DOCUMENT RESUME
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TITLE
PUB DATE
NOTE
,
EDRS PRICE
DESCRIPTORS
IDENTMERS
Senese, Guy Blaise
The Little. White School House: The Impact o
Progressive Reform on the Social and Educe ional
Policy of the United States Indian S J -''ce and Bureau
of Indian Affairs
May 81
91p.; Maste s Thesis, University of Illinois at
bana-Ch paign.
MF01/PC04 Plus Postage:
*Acculturation; *American Indian Education; Boarding
Schools; Culture Conflict; Educational Change;
Educational Discrimination; *Educational History;
Educational Legislation; *Educational Policy;
*Federal Indian Relationship; Government Role; Land
Acquisition; Progressive Education; Religious
Factors
American Indian History; Bureau of Indian Affai s
dphools; Collier (John); *Dawes Allotment Act 887
*Indian Reorganization Act 1934; Merriam Report
ABSTRACT
Chkistian (1880-1900) and Progressive (1920-1940)
reforms affected the U.S. governtent's attempt to acculturate and
educate American In ians. Religious groups supported the. Dawes
Allotment-Act (1887
which allotted parcels of land, previouslytribally held, to in ividual Indians. This led to de-tribalization,
loss of cultural ide tity, and loss of Indian land. Commissioner
Morgan established t
first uniform course of study and began the
gradual shift from se tarian, mission schools to government-managed
schools. Day schools were adopted in.pclicy because of economic
advantage over boarding schools. Progressive reform attempted to
reverse policies that ncouraged Indian de-tribalization and cultural
dissociation. The India Reorganization Act (IRA) (1934) repealed
allotment of lands; enc uraged Indian arts, culture, and community;
and encouraged replacement of boarding schools with day schools. This
period saw defeat of the Bursum Bill, which proposed giving legal
Pueblo land ownership to white squatters; a boost in educational
appropriations effected by\the Merriam Report; John Collier's attempt
to create an educational prpgram that helped strengthen tribal
pqlitical and cultural solidarilyvand-Indian-bilingual education,
Which-grW-iqually from Merriam Report recommendations, IRA
educational provisions, and efforts of educationists who attempted to
implement the approaches of social science and progressive education.
(NQA)
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Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made
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from the original document.
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. 0
THE LITTLE WHITE SCHOOL HOUSE: THE IMPACT OF PROGRESSIVE
REFORM ON THE SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL POLICY
OF THE UNITED STATES INDIAN SERVICE AND
BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, 1895-1940
BY
fr
GUY BLAISE SENESE
A.B., Northern Illinois University, 1975
.t
THESIS
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
`for the degree of Master of Arts in Education
in the Graduate College of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1981
or
Urbana, Illinois
O
.:'PERM1SSION TO REPRODUCE THIS
MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
U.S. DEPARTIPA
NATION
OF EDUCATION
Si ITUTE OF EDUCATION
(2r, 1 y
Setne.._-(?_.
DUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION
CENTER IERICI
II/This document has been reproduced
as
received from the person or organization
I
originating it
l Minor changes have been made to improve
reproduction qurility,
points of view or opinions stated in this docu
silent do not necessarily representothcial
NIE
Position or policy.
TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)."
4%)
rec..
Wae.*VIM
-a -0Q -`,?,g1
a
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANACHAMPAIGN
THE GRADUATE COLLEGE
a
May , 1981
a
WE HEREBY RECOMMEND TuAT THE THESIS BY
GUY BLAISE SENESE
ENTITLED THE LITTLE WHITE SCHOOL HOUSE: THE IMPACT OF PROGRESSIVE REFORM ON THE SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL POLICY OF THE
UNITED STATES INDIAN SERVICE AND BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS,
I
31
1895-1940
BE ACCEPTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR
THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
I)
ctt,r of Thesis Research
Head of Department
Committee oh Final Examinationt
airman
1
1/
Required for (actor's degree bt:t not for master's.
3
4
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I. wish to thank those who influenced the writing of this thesis
and who telped me realize its completion. My gratitude goes to Terry
Denny, who kept me going, kept me honest,and who worked hard to
help me compose clearly. Without his support and encouragement I could
not have. completed this project.
I wish also to thank my wife Jamie, for her patience and for the
life preserver when I was drowning in index cards. There was no substitute for her. love, good cheer and critical acumen. I send my love
and gratitude to my parents, Victor and Ida Senese, for they offered
warm encouragement, when I needed just that, and financial support,
when I needed just that, and*to my sister Sharon, who first introduced
me to the mysteries and the beauty of Native American life. Also,
thanks to the kids) at the Juneau Receiving Home in Juneau, Alaska,
where I went to school. Finally, I tip my cap to Joyce Hipskind for a
beautiful job of-typing and her patience in handling and helping smooth
out a not so final, final draft of this thesis.
4
iv
FOREWORD
Between the turn of the century and the Second World War, move.
ments to reform the Indian Service worked to shape the policy of the Bureau
of .Indian Affairs.
These reforms caused changes in policy which affected
the U.S. government's attempt to acculturate and educate the Indian.
There are two major reform periods: the Christian reform or old
reform of the 1880s and 1890s, and the Progressive, secular or new
of the 1920s and 1930s. The
reilIV
movements culminated, in turn, in the two
most important pieces of Indian-related legislation. The old reform was
responsible, to a large extent, for the Dawes Allotment Act (1887), which
Served to allot parcels of land, previously tribally held, to individual
Indians.
The new reform served to attack the evils which came as a result
of Dawes; detribalization, loss of cultural identity, and especially, the
loss of millions of acres of Indian land as a result of heirship confusion and
land sale by allottees. The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) (1934) resulted
from this second period of reform.
The IRA was, first, an attempt to redress the loss of land which
occurred through allotment; but, in addition, it attempted to reverse policies
that once encouraged Indian de-tribalization and cultural dissociation.
The
IRA both repealed the allotment of lands and acted to encourage Indian Arts,
culture, and community through educational policy changes.
In addition, it
further encouraged the replacement of the boarding school with the day school.
(It appears on the surface that these changes were a direct attack
upon tl(ie'Bureau and the Education Service's traditional policy to assimilate
V
the Indian into white culture. Indeed, many of the new reformers were
optimistic about encouraging the rebirth of Indian societies and community
ideals within a context of the larger polity. '.Their thinking`was influenced
by cultural scientists such'as Franz Boas, who argued for toleration of
disparate life styles and languages. They claimed that no culture was
inferior to that of another, only different; uniquely suited to its own environment.
However, the reformer's dream, expressed in New Deal social
and educational policy, lost much of its revolutionary radiance. The reali-
ties of public policymaking in the era of recovery through social engineering
turned the new reformer's design into a "progressive" strategy for continued
assimilation, and developed programs which would alleviate the economic and
social burdens of the "Indian Problem."
Several themes arose throughout the period discussed in this study.
The land question, social welfare, and the Indian educational problem are
the overarching issues. These have traditionally been the major concern
for the Indian Service. The land question dates back to Columbus. It was
an open sore for which the government previously had a ready cure. How-
ever, with the military defeat of the Indian, a new set of difficultieS arose.
Now, managerial solutions would have to be sought for problems which were no
longer basically military. Now, also, there began the task of dealing with
the gulf between Indian and European culture, and the government had the
burden of welfare for a dispossessed people. Within these questions of land,
education and welfare, some subthemes arise in the context of the early
Christian reform, and continue somewhat altered in the second period after
the first World War.
9
The early reform period was a Christian humanist attempt to assimilate
the Red Man and save hiS soul.
Educational policies of Commissioner Morgan
.
,
t
.
vi
-
emphasized the ne=
Codfearin
to fit the Indian for his assigned role as a hardworking,
r. The Day School was first discussed as a ways to help
P
olution of communities,
but was; adopted in policy to kkep costs
r
\
allevm
down.
The second wave of reform came partly in response to those wh\saw
the day and boarding schools as workhouses where children performed sw at-
shop labor on a diet of bread and coffee, in return
for schooling which (lid
.
tl
not prepare them fir life on either the reservation or in town: However,
these new reformers differed from their predecessors. They were influenced
by Progressivism and by the changes in cultural and social science. This
%
group sought a renaissance of Indian culture and community. However, just
N-
as the early day school was institutionalized because of its economic advan-,
o
tage over the boarding school, so, too, were the new reformer's dreams of
community and culture "sold" to the Bureau.
Bicultural education would
.
raise the sagging spirit of the Indian and fit him better for the ultimate goal-assimilation.
Retribalization of land would likewise help insure the economic
.
independence of the Indian. These programs were conceived by visionaries.
like John Collier as a way to liberate the Indian spirit from the white influence and manipulation.
HOwever, when he be tme Commissioner of Indian
Affairs, Collier himself realized the extent to which this aim would need to
be expressed in terms of the traditional goals of the Indian Service and modifled to fit those goals.
Characteristically, the fruit of New Deal Indian Educational PolicyBilingual- Bicultural Education--was a further example of a program conceived
to liberate and encourage Indian culture, yet was expressed through the
Bureau as a better way to teach English. The failure of Indian bilingual
education underscores the inability of the European American to understand
and tolerate Indian cultures within the context of traditional "American" goals.
e
At the heart of America lay d national purpose, assimilation, which could not
accept or-coexist with, much le
arn from, native American cultures.
f
9
..
c
c
o
0,
8
D
O
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
e
PART ONE: THE OLD REFORM
CHAPTER
THE "INDIAN PROBLEM" OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN
I
REFORMERS
II
1
GENERAL MORGAN'S EDUCATIONAL REFORMATION:
"THE SWEETS OF REFINED HOMES"
III
10
DAY VERSUS BOARDING SCHOOL: WHO PAYS FOR
IV
ASSIMILATION?
18
BOARDING SCHOOLS VICTORIOUS: COMPLACENCY
AND A SECOND WAVE OF CRITICISM
25
el
PART TWO: THE NEW REFORM
0
V
THE PROGRESSIVES AND THE SECULAR INTELLIGENTSIA
31
VI
REFORM IN THE JOURNALS: THE "PROGRESSIVE MIND"
AND THE MERRIAM REPORT
37
APOTHEOSIS OF THE NEW TOLERANCE: JOHN
COLLIER'S "INDIAN NEW DEAL"
48
\VII
\
,
VIII
NEW REFORM DESIGN IN EDUCATION: WILLARD
WALCOTT BEATTY AND BILINGUAL AND BICULTURAL
EDUCATION
0
EPILOGUE
64
,
73
BIBLIOGRAPHY
77
,
9
a
1
PART ONE: THE OLD REFORM
CHAPTER I
1
THE "INDIAN PROBLEM" OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN REFORMERS
For centuries the European American has sought a csolution tb the
Indian "problem:" From the time the first river valley was explored for
its riches in fur; ever since the first ploughs were set to soil, the Indian
was a problem and a force to be dealt with. Alliances, treaties; and trading
pacts were made and broken. It took the European, invaders about 200 years
to completely reduce Indian material resistance. The native Ameribanbeeame
a physical and -spiritual exile in his am land, and powerful tribes. such as
the coglala Lakota became, by 1890, dependent on government for their
mere survival.
There is nothing uniform about the way the government set about its
policies of providing for the survival of its wards, and .facilitating their "inevitable" assimilation into the stream of the American populace.
Although
the Indian standard of living was materially lower than the European AMerican,
the standard varied from .tribal group to group. This depended mainly on
length of Indian-White contact and the economic base upon which the tribe
could depend.
The situation of Plains tribes, dependent for survival upon
the herds of buffalo, differed greatly from the Pueblo groups in Norti
New Mexico, who continued to rely upon their traditional agricultural base
for survival and cultural cohesion.
Throughout the nineteenth century,,these peoples, who varied
so greatly in social and economic life, were viewed as a single lawless'
,
2
impediment requiring, if other means were unsuccessful, military subjugation.
They were fought, and when defeted, v}ere moved often to areas deemed
unfit for habitAion by whites. This late nineteenth-century Wyoming terri.
toiy daily reveals a sense of the attitude commonly taken tdward the Indian
!trace:"
.
The rich and beautiful valleys of Wyoming are destined for
occupancy and sustenance of the Anglo-Saxon race. The wealth
that for untold ages has lain hidden beneath the' snow capped.
summits of our mountains has been .placed there by Providence to
reward the brave spirits whose la it is to compose the advance
guard of civilization. The Indians must stand aside or be overwhelmed by the ever advancing, ever increasing tideof emigration. The destiny of the aborigines is, written in characters not
to be mistaken. The same inscrutable arbiter that decried the
-..downfall of Rome, has pronounced the doom of extinction upon the.
P.edmen of America. The attempt to defer this result by mawking
[sic] sentimentalism is unworthy of a great people. The government may discourage but it cannot prevent this expedition. It
may discountenance but it dare 'not ,retard. . . . Western men
have a style of coming at results by short and direct means. If
that they
these Indian treaties have got into such a tangled
cannot be untied, the sword of the pioneer will cutkatIll .
Indeed, the Indian Was overwhelmed by means short and direct. The
Red River War of 1874-1875 effectively stopped the Southern Plains Indians.
IP%
The Lakota Sioux fought their last battle at Little Big Horn in 1876. The
surrender of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce signalled the end of Indian mili-
tary.response. ChiefJoseph declared that he would "fight no more forever"
and, with the exception of Geibnimo in the 1880s and other sporadic rebellion,
his words became prophecy for all the American Indian pepple.
Subdued by military force and dependent in large measure upon the
federal government for glabsistence, the Indian refused to disappear into the
mainstream of American society.
His condition became the object of a reform
N.
movement that engaged the emotion and energy of many people.
These re-
formerg believed that the growing "Indian Problem" could not be countenanced
o
by a .civilized people.
could
With effort and support, Christian men and women
ring the problem within sight of'solution.2
:11.
4
k
The Department of the Interior vas created in 1849 and with this
the Indian Service passed from military to eivil control. The U.S. civil'
. government assumed administrative responsibility for the Indian.3 Attempts
at -Indian social reform had gained little momentum until one event galvan-
,-
ized the sympathies of the nation to Cie treatment of the Indian; this was
the removal of the Ponca tribe from their home in Nebraska to the Indian
territory in 1876.
The Ponca were renowned for their friendly help to the early Nebraska settlers, and when news of their forcible removal became known; there
was a storm of criticism. The Philadelphia American chastised Interior
Secretary Schurz who ratified the policy. Referring to a dinner given in
his honor, it wrote that "all of the napkins that will be needed will not
.
avail to wipe out the fact that he forced a tribe of peaceful Indians to leave
their hOmes
. .
. there is not Champagne enough in Boston to make the ac-
tion seem creditable, to him or any thoughtful persons who 'respect rights
more than reputations."4 Shurz defended himself by saying that the best
place' for aJi the Indian tribes was the Indiim territory.5
Stimulated by the Ponca case, a number of loosely organized groups
of Christian men and women became6ancerned about the -plight of the India. n.
These groups' attached themselves to the variety of causes which they believed important to Ihdian welfare. In 1879 the Central Indian Committee of
the Women's Home Mission Society was founded in an informal basis and in
1882
submitted a bill to Congress through Senator Dawes of. Massachusetts.
The petition ill
_sked:
t
(a) that treaties be maintained scrtipulottily until the
Indians decided they be changed; (b) that common schools be set up onethe
reservation for the normal and industrial education of every child; (c) that
land be allotted in severalty to all Indians who wanted it--160 acres in fee
12
i
4
4
simple,- inalienable for 20 years; and (d) that all Indians be given Tull rights
available to citizens under the Constitution.6
This idealistic plea garnered great support from churches and mini-
stries, and from their educated' flocks in the East. The plea for allotment
of lands in severalty became the cornerstone of subsequent Indian reform
groups in the late nineteenth century:.
Another strong and politically influential group was the Indian Rights
Association.
They had great successas a lobby in Washington, and they,
too, carried allotment as a key to the lock on the "Indian Problem." The
evangelical reformers wished to individualize the traditionally tribal Indian;
and this individualism can be seen closely allied to the Puritan work ethic.
They wanted to eliminate tribal ownership of land arid to substitute this
with individual holdings. At its root this move was ,a attempt to inculcate
the'values of hard work,' thrift, and individual ownership.
This was the
shortest path to salvation.?
In.. 1887 the Indian Rights Association published a statement in sup-
port of the Dawes Act, which would ratify the allotment of lands in severalty
to individual Indians. It stated:
,
/
.
Congress has at last inaugurated a definite and comprehensive
policy in regard to the Indians. . . . The policy which tempers the
danger of ultimately radical changes with the wise safeguards of
conservative restrictions; which would help the Indians to become
independent farmers and stockmen by making them individual land
holders; which looks to the gradual breaking up of the reservations
on which the Indians are shut from all wholesome contact with our
civilization; which loosens the fatal tribal bonds by bringing the
Indians under our laws and making the way broad for their entrance into citizenship.8
The Daws Act was passed that same year.
The policies of the government were surely shaped by these reform
groups in the years following the military defeat of the Indian and leading
13.
5
to the Dawes Act. Perhaps the most influential association of reformers was
the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends, of the Indian. Much of the
shape of Indian policy in the early twentieth century can be attributed
directly to the gospel according to Mohonk.9
/
All of the groups which met at Mohonk had a strong religious orientation and a powerful influence on policy. Although from its inception in
1883 until 1900, the conference had no official recognition; it exerted a
powerful political influence on the Board of Indian Commissioners. This
was done by word of mouth, by the vigorous press releases and widely
,circulated annual reports, and through its association with other Indian
reform groups. By these combined efforts the Lake Mohonk Conference
became what its promoters had intended--a don:hi-ant force in the ormula-
.
tion of Indian policy in the last decade and a half of the ninteenth century.
The Mohonk Conference participants were formed by the era and the
environment from which they arose.
Their conclusions about the Indian
question and its solution reflect the intellectual trends of the time: Social
Darwinism, the Protestant work ethic, rugged individualism, and Christian
missionary zeal.
The Indian was conceptualized as an immigrant. With the
tide of foreigners continuing its assault on our shores, what better can-,
didate for citizenship than the first Americans?10
Mohonk Was not simply the expression of an exaggerated Christian
jingoism.
The Christian progressives who 'attended Mohonk fell in the
context of the larger social religious thrust, often referred to as the Social
Gospel.
This movement accepted the "premise that social justice and Chris-
tianity were synonymous
.
.
.
emphasizing the humanity of Christ, especially
his concern for the poor and destitute. 11 Ironically, Mohonk leads directly
to the allotment of lands, which caused the Indian, who was culturally
14
6
unprepared for individual ownership, to lose 100 million acres of land over
the next fifty years. Indeed, Senator Dawes himself said that without the
Christian reformers and Social Gospelers of Mohonk, there would have been
no Dawes Act.
The influence of the Social Gospel did, however, represent a change
in the presiding Christian ethic of individual'regeneration. It emphasized a
more equitable social order, and reform became the path to this new bran;
Under the- powerful influence of Henry George's vision of a
of salvation.
cooperative society, presented in Progress and Poverty, Protestant thinkerS
began to reassess thfir.-rolhepherds of the flock. George insisted
that the problem of poverty. could be solved with the help of God and the co.
operation of men.
Thus, economics and religion attained a novel harmony
for a new social age. 12
For the first time, Indian reform began to take on the characteristics
of social engineering. Under the influence of the Indian Rights Association,
the Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian, an4 others the politi-
clans began to take a stronger stance and to exert a greater influence on
the lives of their wards. Yet, a curious dichbtomy began to appear inreform
O
thought and action. On one hand the men at Mohonk advocated the rewards
of individual work and salvation- -the Puritan ethic. The Dawes Act was
-passed and made the Indian an individual land holder for the first time in
his history. On the other hand, though their sincereity and earnestness
cannot be doubted, they had little apparent understanding of the culture and
consciousness of the people they were trying to help. They appeared to
believe that the Indian owned a mind, blank and plastic, ready and eager to
incorporate the knowledge and culture of the white man.
These "Friends of
the Indian"Y'neither understood the nature of, nor did they really believe in,
15
7
the humanity of their "friends." At the same time, however, the reformers
thought that the Indian life and beliefs retained a certain nobility, the
inherent'goodness of all things wild° and natural.
Mohonk Conference notes
of 1901. indicate they recongized the importance of native "industrig."
"They are valuable as a means of profitable occupation, and natural expression;
and valuable to the nation as specimens of art 'rare and indigenous)"
13
Religious reform was base upon two functions of Indian identity.
These are the Indian land and the Indian culture. The Dawes Act became a
.
0
,
reality, not only in response to reformers' demands, bUi as the Act which
served to feed Western land hunger. With the exception of the Five Civilized
Tribes, it gave the president the power to make Indians landowners in
severalty and U.S. citizens. Heads of families received a quarter section;
single men 18 and over, and orphatis,80 acres; those under 18, 40 acres.
14
It is interesting to note wh t Senator Dawes had to say about the bill
after it became law. .He commented that he did not favor giving land to
it. Speaking at Mohonk irh.1887, eight
Indians who were unprepared to wor
months after the law was passed, he \said:
I
President Cleveland said that he did not intend, when he signed
this bill, to apply it to more than one reservation at first. . . which
I thought very wise. But you See he has been led to apply it to
half a dozen. The . . . greed of the land grabber is such as to
press th application of this bill to the utmost. The greed and hunger
of the w ite man for Indiai land is almost equal to his hunger and
thirst for righteousness."
.
Thus criticized by its author so soon after ratification, the Dawes Act stood
as the signal ac evement of the nineteenth-century Christian reformers. One
question remaine
.
Why did Dawes push this bill through without specific
legal guarantees against this "greed and hunger of the land grabber"? After
land, education--as
medium for cultural and social change -was next on the
docket of reform-minde \citizens.
Francis Paul Prucha writes:
16
-4--
8
The Christian Reformers faced the Crisis in American Indian
Policy with honesty and the best of intentions. With singleminded
devotion to their cause they brought forth their panaceas--land
in severalty, law, educatioh, and efficient administration--and by
united effort trimuphantly won their way in Congress. With typical reformer's zeal they swept criticism and opposition aside, for
they knew that they were suprewly right. So much more tragic
then, was their ultimate failure. 1°
These were the early beginnings of the educational path which church
reformers followed -to win the mind of tlfe Indian to the ','American" way of life.
These early efforts set the dissonant tone which was repeated again and again
until the New Deal, when for a brief time a strained harmony was struck between, the Anglo and Indian cultures.
4
9
Notes
"Henry E. Fritz, "The Humanitarian Background of Indian Reform"
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1956), p. 314.
2Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian
Reformers and the Indian 1865-1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1976), pp. 132-133.
3
U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Federal
Indian Po licies--from the Colonial Period through the Early 1973s (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printiqg Office,' June 1973), p. 7.
4Fritz, p. 358.
5lbid., p. 358.
6Prucha, p. 135.
7Prucha, p. 153..
8
Ibid., p. 227.
9
Larry Burgess, The Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the
Indian (New York Clearwater Publishing Co.', 1975), p. 1.
1°Ibid., p. 14.
"Stanley Caine, "The Origins of Progressivism," in Lewis Gould, ed.,
The Progressive Era (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1974),
p. 13.
12Ibid., p. 12.
13
Burgess, p. 15.
"Fritz, p. 386.
15
Ibid., p. 388.
16
Prucha, p. 403.
10
CHAPTER II
GENERAL MORGAN'S EDUCATIONAL REFORMATION:
"THE SWEETS OF REFINED HOMES"
It is of prime importance that a fervent patriotism should be
awakened in their minds. The stars and stripes should be a
familiar object in every Indian school, national Nmns should be
sung and patriotic selections read and recited. They should be
taught to look upon America as their home, and upon the United
States as their friend and benefactor. . . . They should hear little
or nothing of the "wrongs of the Indians" and of the injustice of
the white race.'
--General Thomas J. Morgan
Commissioner of Indian Affairs
General Morgan set out to organize the educational program for the
Indian during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Education was the
tool by whiCh the Indian could enter into American society and compete on
an equal .footing for a place in the social and economic fabric of American life.
Morgan wished to organize a "comprehensive system of training and
n
instruction" which would enable the Indian to redefine his- role in relation to
White society.
He wanted to make the Indian a model citizen who could begin
to enjoy "the sweets of refined homes
.
.
. together with the pleasures that
come from literature, science and philosophy and the solace and stimulus
afforded by a true religion. ''2 Morgan's comprehensive system was the first
uniform course of study established for all the Indian schools. On each of
the culturally diverse reservations, Indian children were faced with the same
textbook, curriculum and program of industrial training.
While Morgan pushed his new program and worked to improve the
quality of teachers in the Indian schools, he also argued for the destruction
19
11
ti
of the reservation system.
He forbade the use of native languages in
school and insisted that only English. be spoken. Assimilationist educational
policy was thus fashioned to help encourage the success of the land allotment policy.
Education for assimilation was as vigorously supported by the
Christian reformers as was allotment, and Morgan worked closely with the
Lake Mohonk Conference and helped to carry out its leading proposals. 3
Morgan believed that the reservation system was an anachronism;
-that it had no place in modern civilization.
He thought that through edu-
bc.ation the Indian could be taught to abandon his tribal, communal ways.
Indians should be educated as Americans, not Indians, and his training
should work to encourage the disintegration of tlfe tribes rather than their
segregation.
He believed that if you began with the young, old habits
would easily give way to industry and love of learning. Morgan thought
that women as well as men could benefit from schooling; that they could be
Mei from a plane-of "servility and degradation" to a point where "their
husbands and men generally will treat them with the same gallantry and
respect which is accorded to their more favored white sisters." 4
Morgan continued to outline the basic task expected of the Indian
boarding school. He wrote:
The period of rising and retiring, the hours for meals, time for
study recitation, work, and play, should all be fixed and adhered to
with great punctiliousness. The irregularities of camp life, which is
the type of all tribal life, should give way to the methodical regulari'ty of daily routine.5
Morgan wished that children acquire a "taste for study and a love for work";
thus their "day of redemption will be near at hand."6
With Morgan at the helm, the federal government began to steer a firm
course toward finalization of an Indian policy, of detilalization and assimila-
tion of the Indian. Morgan's leadership institutionalized this policy further.
In addition, Morgan acted to remove federal support for private, sectarian
2' 0
12
Indian schools; thus began the gradual shift of the responsibility for Indian
schooling from the sectarian, mission school to the government-managed
A 20 percent cut in federal contracts to sectarian schools was
called for in 1895. This looked clearly to the complete termination of federal
school.
support for these schools, and the shift to government acceptance of the
responsibility to educate the Indian.? In reality, however, support was only
reduced but never completely withdrawn and contracts with mission Schools
continue to the present.8 The development of the Federal Indian school
derived from the trend set by Commissioner Morgan. His Uniform Course
.
was not only the origination of a standard curriculum but also the beginnings
of a uniform bureaucracy to administer the educational designs of the Indian
Service.9
Although it did indeed provide the blueprint for the future, the
Allotment period did not give birth to federally supported Indian Education.
Attempts to educate the American predate the allotment of lands in severalty.
During the years
following the military defeat of the Indian, when the reser?...
.
vations were organized, those who initiated Indian policy believed that it was
N.
cheaper to feed them than to fight them and that the great :ihope of the
Indian lay in the education of their children. The Industrial Boarding
Schools put these beXiefs into practice.' It is perhaps' significant that Captain
Pratt, who began the serious training school movement, was a Presbyterian
Army officer who took 72 Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Comanche captives
to be imprisoned at Fort Marion in Saint Augustine, Florida, and determined
to train them for industrial occupation. 10
The government made other effotts at segregated education before
I
I
Pratt began the famous Carlisle Boarding School (alma mater to Jim Thorpe)
in -Pe
c first boarding- schools were opened in the
21
1.
13
1840s, run by the government in cooperation with the missions.
In 1819
a "civilization fund" appropriated ten thousand dollars to provide an elementary education service to the Indian. As early as 1794, the earliest
programs were provided by a treaty authorizing funds for education of
the Oneida's, Tuscarora's, and Stockbridge's. 11
The first substantial funding began with Pratt's Carlisle in 1882;
next, Haskell and Chilocco (1884), Stewart, Sante Fe and Carson (1896),
,.
Pierre (1891), and Flandreau (189'3).12
the turn of the century, 25 board-
ing schools opened off the reservations. 13
Following these early efforts to trait the Indian for a trade came the
unified attempt, during Morgan's era, to tame his savagery, save his soul,
and to inure the Red Man to the White way. Culture clash was inevitable
and the shock produced has reverberated throughout the history of Indian!.
White relations in,.the modern era.
The Indian has been misunderstood by the White man since contact;
cultural differences carried the deepened onus of poverty, disease, and
psychic dislocation. A Presbyterian health nurse at Ganado, Arizona, wrote
,
just after the turn of the century, complaining:
"Navajo babies tumble in the dirt with puppies and kittens and are
fed on pan bread, coffee, mutton, and even green melons. Now,
through our weekly baby conferences, the mothers are learning to keep
them clean and warm,. to give thein canned tomatoes, and goat's milk,
and to be proud of a gain in weight . . . they have waited a long time
for someone to teach them this better way.14
Obviously, she failed to understand, as did most humanitarian, denominational,
and governmental groups, the extent to which Indian dietary and health prob-
lems were due to poverty rather than savagery.
At the turn of the century, many saw the Indian floundering in a pit
of spiritual as well as physical decay.
Indian morals we ,e clearly substandard
14
in relation to Whites'; their dances lewd and heathen; their use of drugs,
such as peyote and alcohol was roundly condemned; and the custom where
pubescent girls were given for trial by prospective husbands was considered
child prostitution. 15 Indeed, if the Indian had any chance to walk the Jesus
road, he would need to alter these uncivilized and sinful habits.
Education became the panacea for these perceived moral and social
ills, as well as a means of moving the Indian to his place within the White
economic system.
While the Indian lost his hold on the land -one hundred
million acres between 1887 and 1934 -he lost hold of his cultural inheritance
as well; and, indeed, his grip upon himself as an Indian.
During Morgan's term, Herbert Welsh wrote of the commissioner's
reorganization of the Indian Service: "To him [Morgan] must be accorded
the credit of great improvement of the government school system." 16 "The
American Indian must take his place with all possible speed in the common
life of th: American People. One alternative is presented to him, --and to
us.on his behalf; he must take our education, religion, law, land, --in fact,
life, becoming one with us;
.
.
.
absorption or extermination are the only
alternative."17
This appeal was written as part of a report to upgrade the Indian
Civil service; to improve the quality of its agents, and to reform the spoils
system by which unscrupulous agents had taken to lining their pockets with
federal Indian funds.' Yet, this idea of reform referred only to the quality
of the governmental bureaucracy, not to the quality of Indian life on the
reservation. Welsh's report included a discussion of the "Ghost Dance" which
swept the plains in the 1880s, when the tribes were looking for the Messiah
that the missionaries had promised; who would surely deliver them from the
bad dream that had become their life -to the return of the buffalc, and for
23
15
the White to disappear back across the plains. Welsh saw needed change
o
only because the present agent, Royer, was unable to control this "Messiah
Craze." Welsh wrote that the "battle" at Wounded Knee (a slaughter of
Indian women, children, and old people, which came in response to their
refusal to disperse from such a dance) was the result of an unfortunate change
of agents. The new agent had arrested the band's leader, Big Foot, -and
a
put him in the guardhouse but then "weakly released him and allowed him to
escape. tt 18
The Indian Rights Association appealed to President Benjamin Harrison
to improve agents, and to extend the Civil Service law to the Indian Service.
In this way a major religious reform group saw the. "battle" at Wounded Knee
merely to be the result of maladministration. Similarly, reform groups viewed
41(
the challenge of Indian education as an administrative problem, a problem the
solution to which lay in extending bureaucratic control further into the regime
of the Indian school.
The effort to establish consistent burewacratic response to the variety
of Indian pr,ciblems did not end with the commissionership of General Morgan.
Rather, the mold of Indian Educational Administration was not broken but merely
retooled throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The argument
surrounding the effort to educate the Indian moved from what should be to
where pit should be done. The content of Indian Boarding School curriculum
was not the object of concern. to those who followed Morgan. Rather, they
questioned the propriety of the Boarding School itself. In its place, critics
of the Boarding Schools proposed the Community Day School, an institution
which would be the fruit of the next controversy over the most efficient way
to civilize the Indian.
16
Notes
1
General Thomas J. Morgan, Report of the Commissioner of Indian
Affairs. The Education of American Indians, O. 10.
2Ibid.
3Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis, p. 146.
4Morgan,
pp. 1-5.
6Ibid., p. 9.
.
Fischbacher, "A Study of the Role- of the Federal Government in the Education of the American Indian" (Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona
State University, 1967), p. 279.
7Theodore
8Ibid., p. 281.
p. 315.
10
.
p. 299.
0.
11
U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Iridian Affairs, Federal
Indian Policiesfrom the Colonial Period through the Early 1970s (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 1973), p. 7.
12M
Szasz, "Education and the American Indian--the Road to
Self Determination, 1928-1973" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of New
Mexico, 1.974), p. 10.
13
Ibid.
14_
.uavida Woerner, "Education Among the Navaho" (Ph.D. dissertation,
Columbia University, 1941), p. 102.
15
G. E. E. Lindquist,. The Red Man and the United States, with
foreword by Charles 'E. Burke, Commissioner of Indian Affairs (New York:
George Poram & Co., 1923), pp. 65-76; 287, 391.
16
Herbert Welsh,. "The Murrain of Spoils in the Indian Service,"
paper presented to the National Civil- Service Reform League, Baltimore,
Maryland, December 1898, p. 3.
25
17
17Ibid. ,
p.
2.
18ibid., p. 5.
Ay
20
18
4
CHAPTER III
DAY VERSUS BOARDING SCHOOL: WHO PAYS
FOR ASSIMILATION?
Commissioner Morgan established the theme of uniformity for govern-
ment tadian Education policy. In addition to the standardized curriculum,
the segregated boarding school became the accepted mode of instruction.
The
25 off-reservation schools were the front line in the war on Indian ignorance
and savagery.
However, a new argument was developing in support of on-
reservation community day schooling.
'
During the years between the turn of_the' century and 1926, the
fortunes of the day school supporters waxed and waned in response to public
and government el perceptions regarding the function of the day school.
Some
analysts view the day school as the beginning of a prog essive policy of
Indian 'Community development., It appears clearer that the day schools were
advocated as economically superior to the boarding schools, and a preferred
method for further, assimilating and detribalizing the Indian. If there is any
hint of tribal reformation in the tlay school campaign, it lay in the plans of
a minority of refoimers who saw the possibilities of the day school for the
return to tribal solidarity and community:
In 1895 the National Education Association began, to make clear its
ideas on the education of the American Indian. The Association reported in
that year:
Until a quarter of a century ago the only means used for solving
the Indian question were the few philanthropic men and women missionaries -among them. After a long time they finally stepped aside, and
the [schoolmistresi] stepped in, . . . and she ,accomplished in a short
27
(I
19
p
e.......
time, and in a far better waywhat the bullet could not accomplish
duAng all the years that had passed. . . . Let there be no doubt
that an education which inculcates the tastes and establishes the
ideals of current American civilization constitutes the proper first
Step in the work of civilizing the Indians.'
There was little to alter, the tenor of the position of the National Education
*Association (NEA) and. its representatives.
H. B. Frissell, principal of the
Hampton Indian School addressed the association. He claimed that while we
aijcelebrate the fact that slavery is ,gone .forever, in some ways we lament
its passing. Under "favorable conditions", it was More successful than the
,
reservation,for.the training of a "barbarous race." "Slavery brought the
colored man into cldse contact with his white brother, training him in habits
of wol:k, giving him a knowledge .of the white man's language and religion.".2
.
e
Frissell spoke \of Americans' attitude toward the Indian. He said that people
,
4
still prefer annihilation over assimilation. He quoted an old Montana man he.
..
.
fr
had met, who said,'"'Ar.e you one of these that is trying to tame the Indians?
Well, I'll -tell you how I tame tem.
There's a well in my backyard, and there
aint no wally; but there's seve n tame Indians in it.m3 This colorful if somewhat lopsided view of the general American attitude toward the Indian serves
as a strong indication that the white American at the turn of the century
had little sympathy for, or understanding, the complicated "problem" of
the American Indian. Men like Frissell, Pratt, and others believed their
segregated ethicational plan would best, prepare the Indian to become American
.,
.
wage earners or farmers in the mold of their white "brothers."
.
a
.
Francis E. Leupp was one of the earliest administrators who took umbrage
with the off-reservation boarding school system.
His criticism did not, how-
everattac1.- the basic goals of assimilation toward which the boarding schools
--.,
worked. ,Rather, he. claimed-that they failed to assimilate the Indian successfully and to do so inexpensively. Though he was at first critical of the
2E
.a
20
N
fact that Indian culture and nobility is destroyed by the off-reservation
boarding school, his principal consistent argument was that they were
"expensive failures.° 4
Leupp was appointed by Theodore Roosevelt for his "peculiar fitness"
for the job-of 'commissioner; a position he held from 1904 to 1909.
During
those years he champions the day school and wears a self-assigned badge
labelled "progi.essive." It was not long before he broke with the Mohonk
group, even though he had been closely associated with them earlier.5 He
first rejects their goal to strip the'Indian of his unique qualities and to
remake him into the image of a white man. Indeed, Leupp appears to appre-
ciate the Indian's physical and cultural heritage. Yet it soon becomes clear
that the emphasg in his policy seas essentially "that Indians would be more
effectively molded into willing, patriotic ci tizens by friendly educational
.,
practices . "6
Others in the Indian educational service also saw the day school
simply in terms of its effect on teaching the Indian civilized life. For one
reservation teacher, the day school was a place where the child could ab-
sorb the life style of the white teacher and her family, as they go about
...,.
their work of cultivation and orderly housekeeping. 7 This worker said she
consulted 30 other teachers and -all, but' two agreed with her ide, that the
day scho'ol, had the potential to be a powerful influence. By imitation, the
Indian would certainly model the white way.8
There was a frequent contradiction which arose from the arguments
of Indian educators at the beginning of the day school' period.
For example,
Calvin W. Woodward, Director of the Manila). Training School at Washington
Ihiversity, wrote that he noticed the failure .of Indian students returning to
the reservation from the Boarding School. He said that the best achievable
S
21
success in Indian education was to turn children away from the traditions
of their ancestor's tribes, thereby completing the depopulation and final
extinction of the tribes. This plan, he said, "should be carried out relentlessly; every child should be withdrawn and none should ever be allowed to go
back [to the reservation]." Yet, at the same time, Woodward said, "this resuit, which is the logical outcome of the government boardingschool, cannot
be condemned too strongly."
It would mean the complete destruction of the
tribes. He believed "Americanization" to be the only legitimate goal of proper
education, yet lamented the outcome of what would, be taken as a- "successful"
program of training.
Clearly, the fundamental paradox position plaguing Indian education
as an arm of reform begins with this period-. Total assimilation and tribal
annihilation is 'encouraged, yet reformers balked at the kind of cultural
genocide which -this policy would initiate.
It sought the end of the Indian
problem, yet could not cope with the moral consequences of racial or cultural
obliteration.
The day school provided a partial solution to this dilemma. Francis
Leupp saw it as a means to preserve Indian bloodlines and tribal identity
while educating him for American citizenship more thoroughly and economically.
Ho ever, the preservation oftculture was clearly sacrificed in pursuit of
econo
advantage. Letipp was able to say, at an NEA roundtable confer-
ence, tha he dreamt of abandoning the boarding school in favor of the day
School.
Fro
this he envisioned a.great community school system which
would one day merge into the public school fabric of American education .10
Community schooling would occur in concert with'the hope that "we ease
[the\old-fashioned Indians] down the steps to the grave; but as they pass
away, other generations \come in after them whom w e4.can steer aright
because we can begin while they are still young enough."11
-it
22
Later, Leupp says:
That is, where the Day School is doing great work, it is right ,
under the nose of the old Indian. Of course, there is still, among
some of the old Indians, a very great opposition to education, or
what we style education. The old fashion Indian wants his child to
follow the old Indian ways, and believes they are better for it. We
have to put the school proposition on a very practical around with
him. First we appeal to his instinct for self protection. We say,
"The White people are coming, they are here." After we appeal
in that way, if he still resists, we say plainly that his children must
go to school long enough to learn the simple things, whether he likes
it or not. And if he still does not listen to the words of the Government, we send the policeman or the soldier out to sh,:.v him that we
mean business.12
Leupp's main criticism of the boarding school was that it was an "ec.:,.--
cational almshouse" and he proselytized the Day School to the public, primari-
ly on the grounds that it was less expensive. Leupp claimed the cost of
1.0
educating a child in the Boarding School to be $250.00 per child\compared
to $50.00 for the Day School.13 The degree to which Leupp supported
tribal solidarity through the day school or any other means, for that matter,
was confirmed in an article he wrote:
"The Red Man Incorporated." In this
piece Leupp argued to incorporate the Choctaw and Chicasaw tribes in Indian
territory as a joint stock company. He said this because the tribes were
leasing valuable coal-bearing land to other parties, who had begun extraction
of resources. Leupp proposed the incorporation not only as a way to prevent
the sale of their lands, but as a way to e courage the dissolution of Indian
tribes and to "absorb their persons and property in the great American
conglomerate .
.
.
[that] from--their ancient to our modern economic basis
these people would have been led so gently that they could hardly tell. what
guided them over the gulf. That is the consummation toward which we are
all working. n14
In this way Leupp remained close to the assimilationist spirit of the
"Friends of the Indian" and other nineteenth-century reformers. The day
31
.4
-23
school was another strategy for achieving "consummtiori," and was sold to
the public by appeal to its economical aspects. Other dividends would be
"the good things in connection with these schools--bathhouses
home cooking,
.
.
.
.
.
. .
practical
. children going back and forth to school, cleanly clad,
. the Lord's Prayer; patriotic songs; the sound of the school bell and
the daily floating of the flag; [these influences] unobtrusively drawing chil-
dren and their parents together nearer to civilization
32
.
.
. ',15
24
-
Notes
1
Dr. W. N. Hailman, "The Next Step in the Education of the Indian,"
paper presented to National Ecucation Association Meeting, Denver, 1895
(St. Paul:' Pioneer Press, 1895), p. 6.
2H.
B. Frisselr, "The Indian Problem," pape presented to National
Education Association Meeting, 1900, Charleston, South Carolina.
4
Theodore Fischbacher, p. 306.
5
Mark W. Sorensen, "Progressive Policy in American Indian Education:
Francis E. Leupp, Commissioneg of Indian Affairs 1904-1909" (Master's thesis,
University of Illinois, 1975), p. 32.
6
.'
7C.
p. 35.
C. .Covey, "Thservation Day School Should be the Prime
Factor in Indian Education," paper presented to the National Education
Association, ,1901, p. 901.
8
.
9Calvin Woodward, "What Shall be Taught in an Indian School?", paper
presented to National Education Association, Detroit, 1901, pp. 904-65:
1°Francis E..Leupp, transcript of National Education Association round-
table conference, University of California at Los Angeles, 1907 (in Bullgtin
of NEA,. 1907), pp. 1015-1021.
12Ibid.
13Francis
E. Leupp, "The Red Man, Incorporated," in Colliers, January 9, 1909, p. 20.
-14 Ibid.
15J. J. Duncan, "The Necessity for More and Better Equipped Day
Schools," paper to National Education Association, 1905, p. 594.
33
25
CHAPTER IV
BOARDING SCHOOLS VICTORIOUS: COMPLACENCY
AND A SECOND WAVE OF CRITICISM,
With the appointment of Robert G. Valentine as Commissionef of
Indian Affairs in 1901, there was a return of interest in the boarding
school, especially for the vast and remote Navaho reservation.
Valentine,
,a former private secretary to Leupp, placed emphasis upon using the boarding school to deal with the problem of educating a semi-nomadic people.'
To some extent, the emphasis shifted from the day schoor(back to the boarding schOol in response to "special problems" in dealing with groups which
appeared 'bore resistent to cultural assimilation. Regardless of which way
th pendulum swung between day- or boarding-school emphases, the years
betweerillInd
1925 saw the birth of 'a' new group of reformers. They
.
responded to a I;# t of new abuses aflicting the Indian Service, most of
which had arisen from t
allotment of lands in severalty and problems re-
lated -to conditions on the reservations and especially within the schools.
In 1916 another, attempt was marl .to put a Uniform Course of Study
into effect. As it had with Morgan, this' atteMpt flew in the face of extreme
tribal, cultural diversity. 2 For the first sixyears
school, the new system
followed the standard curriculum of the white public school.' Vocational
training was emphasized in the latter years; educators were disturbed, that
the Indian was not prepared to enter the competitive industrial and agriciiltur/
al arena. These "training programs," however, were used to help keep the
Inditin schools financially solvent. Daily operations, such as the laundry,
34,
26
food service and maintenance were operated under the aegis of these "pro-
graft." An hourly breakdown of pupil activity shows that this labor or
"application" of their industrial training came to at least twenty hours a
week during the first and second year of high school. 3 These ,"application
periods" appear in consistently gross disproportion to the training hours
received for their accomplishment., The reformers of the 1920s cited these
figures and attacked the regime of these newly styled "vocational!' schools.
A system of forced labor had grown up in a public boarding schools where
tuberculosis, malnutrition, and trachoma ravaged the overcrowded buildings.
This situation continued unchanged even after the Department of
the Interior voiced disgust over a situation where the large proportion of
boys and girls return to their reservations froM the bbarding schools and
"fail to put into practicewhat they were taught at the -schools."4 Yet in
1919 Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells aged that we press on with
the "industrial class work" which produced this failure. He urged further
that the Indian schools must continue to build character, morals, and en/,`
courage the discrimination between right and wrong. 5 In addition, he
.
asuaged any fears that equipment and materials might be inadequate in the
schools, when he wrote that "good books and equipment are a great aid,
blit they are not always essential. A good teacher can accomplish wonders
without them"; though he went on to say that "there is about an Indian
school a great deal of institutional work and in the necessity for doing this
the instruction of the pupil is apt to be forgotten. Even here with proper
methods much of the necessary work can be made of more value for instruc-
tion than at present. "`
In 1917 Sells created the administrative proviso whereby school
attendance could earn students a certificate of competency for land acquisition,
33
27.
This meant that the holder of a certificate could claim his patent in fee
with schooling posted as evidence of the ability to administer to his or her
property. In this way-more land could be allotted to more Indians sooner.
Later critics claimed this policy helped further set the stage for mass dis-
possession of land as it fell into the hands of inexperienced young men and
women whose only educational preparation for proprietorship was three years
of laundry And clothes repair on a diet of black bread and coffee.
41k`i'
In a letter to graduate Belle Peniska of Carlisle, .Sells ,wrote to
congratulate her for her diploma and the acceptance of her patent in fee:
I send you this certificate of. educational competency, feeling that
you have earned such recognition. . . . High minded, sweet tempered
home keepers are the bringers of strength and virtue to social welfare.
Hold fast to your highest ideals; they will be among your best friends
in any work you do. Should you acquire any land hereafter, be careful in its management, and feel free to consult this bureau, if you °
desire, about any matter affecting it.7
Sells saw that his policies serve to effect the dissolution of tribal
bonds, interracial barriers and that they would hap absorb the Indian into
the general population. 8 His policies did not, however, go unscrutinized.
In 1919, a congressional committee investigated the Indian Service's new
programs of educational and "half-blood" land competency. Sells scrupulously
defended his position.
He urged Congressman Kelly in this way:
If you were to visit one of the Indian non - reservation boarding
schools, and I .hope you may, you will be proud of the fact that you
are' a member of the Indian committee. No man with red blood can
come in contact with Indian boys and girls in the vocational schools
of the Indian bureau without being proud of the fact he is an American.
However, when pressed on the extent of the Bureau tests to determine compe-
tency, Sells said that they do not inquire into individual cases except to
determine that the Indian in question is not "an imbecile." He also reiterated
the basic bureau goal to discourage tribal association and relations.
36
10
'28
Further criticism began to come from disclosures that there were
.
serious attendance problems in the Indian schools, especially in the Southwest. In response to this, another move was made to establish the board-
ing school and to consolidate its authority within the government. In 1920,
the School Appropriations Act carried a rider that minimum attendance criteria
be set for the schools." Furthermore, Congress reacted to the disclosure
that 10,000 Indian children in the Southwest were not enrolled in school, and
enacted a compulsory education law.
Act, but proved more effective.
This law was a repetition of an
1891101
It resulted in an enrollment drive which
filled schools to capacity and greatly increased school attendance. Yet, to
effect this change, truant agents had nearly to resort to kidnapping. 12
The August 1924 issue of "School and Society" reports that Secretary of
Interior ITurbert Work ivould act to enlarge the capacity of existing boarding
schools to accommodate about 1,000 additional children in 1925.
The new
compulsory education law caused the already meager facilities to be overtaxed. 13
The new generation of reformers acted in response to the host of
problems which arose aS a result of the Dawes Allotmerit Act (1887) and the
social and educational policy 'Which worked to support it. The lack of health
care, sanitation, insufficient diet, child labor; the returned student problem,
where schooling inadequately prepared the Indian for reservation Life; overemphasis upon routine vocational tasks; sham competency requirements; and
a complete lack of attention paid to indigenous Indian cultural values in art,
music, religion, and language; these all worked to arouse criticism. This
new. generation became seriously' concerned with Indian culture and 'saw in
its genius an alternative to the life way of the Western-European American.
For the first time, reform' fervor was fiteled by the perspectives of the
progressive cultural and social science.
37
This interest, as well as the growing
a
29
awareness that Allotment period policies were bankrupt, branded the new
period with its peculiar progressive-scientific appearance. However, the
traditional goal of Indian assimilation would not change easily even as the
work of the new reformers began to impinge on policy in the recovery years
of the New Deal.
5
33
e`
30
Notes
4
I'DavidaWoerner, "Education Among the Navaho," p. 56.
2
Theodore Fischbacher, "A Study of the Role," p. 316.
3
U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Report
pi the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Department of the Interior
(IVashington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 19.16), p. 9.
4
U.S. Department Of Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual
Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners (Washington; D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1917), p. 334.
5
U.S. I%partment of Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Report
of Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1920), pp. 14-15.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
a
Ibid.
,9
U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Indian Affairs, Conditions
of Various Tribes of Indians, 66th Cong., 1st sess.', 1919, p. 57:
1 0I .
bid, p. 56.
11Fischbacher, p. 391.
12Ibid., pp. 268-69.
.
13 School
1924):174.
and Society, "Indian Schools," vol. 20, no. 502 (August
(
39
31
PAit
TWO:- THE NEW REFORM
CHAPTER V
THE PROGRESSIVES AND THE SECULAR INTELLIGENTSIA
It is useful to*view 'Progressivism as both a popular political move-
cent with foundations in traditional American values of indusilk, democracy,
te,chnology, and as an intellectual movement with an investment in the new
sInce.
The roots of Progressivism are deep in both the old Protestant work
eanic and in the profoundly secular new, sciences of- Sociology, and Anthropology.
These seemingly contradictory sources of the American Progressiye
movement during this period determine the fundamental character of its re/
lationship to the new reform in Indian affairs. The paradox of the Progres-
sive mind is reflected in Indian policy from the start. It helps us view the
way in which idealist fervOr is welded to the gospel of efficiency to product
a streamlined chariot of mercy.
Progressivism has been described as partly an effort to define and
alleviate the great §ocial probleMs, both domestic and foreign, which were
created by the rapid changes of urbanization and industrialization.' This
general mobilization of political and social force expressed itself Iii different
voices with .variant recipes for change.
'The old reform consisted in the efforts of a variety of concerns:
Christians intent on assimilating the Red Man to the. Jesus road; women's
groups with similar aims but who raised the problem of Indian ignorance
and ill health for all to bear in conscimce;. educators who otight for the
40
4
32
method-of schooling best suited for the Indian and who waged their battle
in the war of the.:Day versus the Boarding School. These early activists
prepared the ground for a journalistic outcry during the twenties. The
Muckraking was profuse and Indian ills were described in vivid detail. It is
sometimes said that the progressive mind was a journalistic sensibility.
The critical journalism of the time took on the ,peculiarly secular tone
which identified many of its Rositions, yet the progressive intellecutals had
their roots in a variety of soils. Their idealism was less guided by a tradition of Christian humanism than by an alliance to a growing "gospel of
efficiency" and a belief in democratic self-determination. . However, demo-
Cratic ideals were often strained in competition with the equally traditional
virtues of. competition and entrepeneurship. All the, while, the cry for improvempnt was pushed one way toward the establishment of a planned policy
and another,toward conservation of the traditional value of laissez faire.
All
this was expressed through the medium of the Christian, passion for righteous-
ness and humanitarian spirit. 2 In this complex manner, competing drives and
holdover traditions acted to make progressive Indian reform more confused
In intent and charged, with more contradictory elements than was the old
altruistic Christian reform movement.
If the progressive reform viewed the Indian in a new light, a great
credit for the illumination extends to the effect of the fledgling science of
Anthropology ,and its development of a new conception, a new definition of
aboriginal peoples, and their culture. Anthropology, helped to alter permanently the intellectuals' understanding of the American Indian. Prior to 1925
most thought the Indian was a dying race, destined to extinction by war,
c
disease, intermarriage, and failure to breed. 3 Indeed, many of the reforms
directed toward Indian welfare were designed to ease this passage to
41
33
obliteration, rather than to bolster and encourage the growth of the "Red
Race."
However, under the influence of Franz Boas, a generation of anthro-
pologists began to elucidate ,a novel conception of race and civilization. Prior
to this time the most common conception of Man held that different races,
and peoples were at different levels of civilization and were related by com-
parison from most to least civilized.. The notion of the p4mitive was strictly
pejorative and Served to a piss negative judgment, for example, on the
.
Boas argued that culture and. civiliza ones.vere separate objects:
Hottentots by comparison `with "advanced" Westejn European culture.
He stated that alien, supposedlyinferiOr
ultur s are in fact "on a different
equilibrium of emotion
and reason which [is] of no
*
ss value than ours.. "4'
Wectern European ethics cannot be used to denigrate t
actions in another
culture. For example, to the traditional Inupiat Eskimo, 't. would be
an indefensible breach of filial duty.not to kill an infirm pare t. 5 Boas's
work rocked the foundation of this monistic, qualliatively gradua d cultural
i notion of inherent racial sup riority
understanding. Boas simply denied the
x
or inferiority.
,
-
Ruth Benedict worked to further articulate this revolutionary conce
of culture.
She became critical of the materialistic foundation of white Euro-
pean culture. In addition, she attacked racial myopia in a time when civilization had thrown diverse peoples into intimate contact. 6 Benedict warned
against the temptation to make quick judgments of culture based on observa-
tions or custom seen through the clouded lens of one's own belief structure
and habits.? She argued that we all operate from the framework of our own
institutions and thus we may easily fall into error regarding judgments of an
.
ethical nature.
42
34
The social thinkers who were involves' -.fin the new Indian: reform
heeded this message. One of*theiT first complaints'\concerned the treatment
of Indian religious custom by the Bureau of Indian'Affin
In concert with
the awakening interest in aboriginal _societies, there was also' growing
fascination with Indian art as the expression of a p e and untram led cul-
ture. This novel concern in Indian cultural institutions continued to p
foundly effect the White intellectual community.
N
The post-World War I artist
.
'and the social scientist both began to discover the purity and beauty\ m
the
designs.-of'- the indigenous Indian expression.
$
Indeed, some of the first critical rumblings of the new era )f reform
came not from benevolent social clubs but from among the ranks of artists
whohad moved to Taos, New Mexico, from New York's Greenwich Village.
The Taos Art ,Movement saw the formal purity in Indian art; and the beauty
of the New Mexico Highlands served to inspire their own work. Influenced
by the new social sciences, the political activism of this group and that of
other intellectuals began to leave a deep mark upon the reform consciousness
of the day.
It helped raise the public awareness toward the dignity and
importance of the Indian peoples and their heritage.
During the 1920s, criticism of the Indian Bureau came into view of
the public and .the goverment by those who were influenced by Progressive
ideals and the culturalsciences. The time was indeed ripe, not only' for
Omit
reform but for an emergency effort to save the Indian from further, perhaps
total, disintegration. By the end of World War I, the India) suffered increasingly from disease, short life expectancy, malnutrition, and the effects
of a stagnant repressive school system .12
Yet the issue which galvanized reform during the 1920s was not the
immediate question,of health or education.
43
It was, again, the land: an issue
35
which arose when the climate of opinion was rea y for reform. The Bursum
Bill of 1922, an Act to quiet title to land within P eblo Indian land grants,
proposed to give legal land ownership to white squa ters on Pueblo lands,
and to force the Indiana to prove ownership of their l d . Establishing
such proof would have been difficult, if not impossible, or the Pueblos
would need to clarify ownership through three periods of ccupation--Spanish,
Mexican, and American. The Bursum Bill, like the Dawes
ct before it,
bore witness to the land hunger of those who lived near the reservations. 13
As with the Ponca case, the controversy which arose around the Bursum
Bill served to catalyze a growing interest in Indian rights and welfare.
It
came at a time when Indian rights advocates recognized the effects of the
aisasterous Allotment Act.14
Those people who involved themselves with the.Bursum conflict
formed an advance guard of intellectuals who addressed the question of tribal
sovereignty and cultural homogeneity.
Their arguments, expressed in
pular journals of the day, set the pace and tone for the new era. Just
as t
work, of the Christian reformers culminated in the allotment of lands,
the effo
of this generation became associated with the Indian Reorganization
Act (IRA),
hich put a virtual end to allotment in severalty. Yet while this
new reform, exh'bited perhaps a higher awareness of the dignity and sovereignty of Indian peopl- as the movement acted to impinge on policy in the 1930s,
an assimilationist crite on was often used to support its recommendations.
Compared with the policie produced from the old religious reform, the new
\ire
era set a new frame around
same picture. The clear vision of a new
reform became a distorted images it rolled through the press of policy formation.
44
I,.
1
36
Notes
/
W. Grantham, Jr., "The Progressive Era and the Reform
------ Traditional," in Mid-America, vol. 46, no. 4 (1964):227.
1Dewey
2
Ibid., p. 249.
3Oliver La Farge, ed., The Changing Indian (Norman, Oklahoma:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1942), p. 167.
4Franz Boas, "The Mind of Primitive Man," in the Annual Report
of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1902), p.. 460.
5Ibid., p. 459.
6
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston:
1934), p. 10.
Houghton Mifflin Co.,
7Ibid., p. 9.
8Lawrence Kelly, The Navaho Indians and Federal Indian Policy,
1900-1935 (Tucson, Arizona: University-of Arizona Press, 1968), p. 179.
a
"Gordon McGregor, "Indian Education in Relation to the Social and
Economic Background of the Reservation," in Oliver La Farge, ed., The
Changing Indian (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1942),
p. 118.
-,
.
18DavidaWoerner,"Education Among the Navaho," p. 107.
llIbid., p. 126.
lclargaret Szasz, Education and the American Indian, p. 12.
/
13Ibid., p. 13.
14Ibid.
,
t
45
ab
37
4
CHAPTER VI
REFORM IN THE JOURNALS: THE "PROGRESSIVE MIND"
r
AND THE MERRIAM REPORT
I.
The Bursum and bill was a hot item for. the Muckrakers when it
appeared on September 11, 1922.
By December 6, 1922, The Outlook'
magazine had published an article condemning the bill. They mention the
fact that the bill (which would allow white settlers to claim that land they
squatted on illegally) would deprive the Indians of land they had lived on
for hundreds of years. 1 The bill also exhibited some of the "back-to-theland" spirit so apparent in Progressive, Populist politics. The Progressives
.
elt that the federal government was meddling too deeply into local affairs.
Thus, the Bursum Bill stated that the jurisdiction of land claims courts
would move from the federal to local courts.
While this move appealed to
states righters, it obviously put the courts much closer to white vested-'
interests.
John Collier, a leading voice and future Commissioner under Roosevelt,
wrote in the Sunset magazine of the failure nd corruption of the Indian
Bureau.
\
He claimed that the Bureau harrassedhe critics of the Bursum bill
and had threatened suits of libel, jail sentences, add future exclusion from all
Indian reservations.2 He was critical of the weaknes \ of Commissioner Charles
Burke, who had claimed that under the tyranny of Secretary of the Interior
Albert A. Fall, the Indian office was helpless.3 Fall had helped author the
Bur sum bill.
46
38
The Sunset was at the forefront of the critique of the Bureau and
Collier was a frequent contributor. Only six times between November 1922
and June 1924 did the magazine fail to print an ariticle critical of the
Indian Bureau.4 Collier contributed five Bursum-related articles.
Bursum was the main, if not the sole, issue brought to public attention in the magazines. The prestigious Forum carried an interesting c-bate
between Mary Austin and Flora Warren Seymour.
Mrs. Seymour echoed the
nineteenth-century assimilationists; she argued that the Indian would indeed
recoil if the buffalo 'were returned and the prairies were once again unbroken.
She says, "If some sentimentalists had their way, Indians of the younger
generation,
. . .
would go back to their old picturesque dances and wor-
ships."6 Mary Austin replies that while it would indeed be impossible to
return to the state of nature, this is no reason for the Indian Bureau
to serve a white and not an Indian constituency. She mentions a book which
was written by G. E. Lindquist, and was forwarded by then Commissioner of
Indian Affairs C. Burke. The book, she said, The Red Man in the United
States, is not primarily about Indians at all, rather it is a study of the
progress of Christian missions among the tribes.
The book attempts to dis-,
cover whether we have made the most of our Indians for our own welfare
and for theirs; and queries to what extent we have made good Presbyterians,
Baptists, and Methediiis of them.6
The opposing strains of reform criticism exemplified in these .debates
begged the question of what it meant to be and Indian. Mrs. Seymour saw
no turning back to pre-contact days; therefore, criticism of any Bureau
efforts to help the Indian are unwarranted; time and civilization march on.
On the other hand, Austin said the Indian was wronged by its benefactor,
the government.
Her supposedly more progressive stand asserted that the
47
39
Indian lived protected by a special dependency relationship to the government.
This lack of ability to define the Indian lay at the root of the diffi-
-,` culty that different reformers had in agreeing on their goals. However,
'deep as these differences ran,they were insufficient to stall the momentum
of Criticism in the journals.
'I
The attacks continued. Many writers, like M. Clyde Kelly, a mem-
ber of the U.S. House from Pennsylvania, saw the inequity of providing
welfare to the poor overseas, while the Indian starved at home.? Criticism
of poor living conditions continued apace with the Bursum controversy. In
"Let 'Em Die!" Walter Woehlke, Ei critic associated with the Taos Art Movement,
let,fly a broadside on the trachoma epidemic (a preventable, parasitic eye
disease that leads eventually to blindness) which ravaged the boarding
schools.
Ninety percent of the children suffered from this ailment.8 John
Collier, along with his constant attacks on the allotment policy, and Bursum,
also began criticism of the trio of Indian health problems: tuberculosis,
trachoma, and syphilis.
In addition, Collier voiced his disgust at the way
the whites encouraged the Indian to lose their race memory, art, and religion.
Indeed, he was later to make the restitution of Indian culture the hallmark
.
9
of his commissionerslup
.
Truly, the press and in particular the popular magazine helped give
momentum and voice to Indian reform.
However, the individual magazines
were not always consistent in their editorial stands regarding the "Indian
Problem." For example, the Outlook roundly condemned the Bursum bill for
unfairly disenfranchizing the Indian of his birthright. Yet on another occasion, the Outlook supported Commissioner Sells's 1917 competency policy,
(.,
whereby more land would fall into the hands of inexperienced Indians and
thus eventually wind up for sale. The Outlook declared it better that some
48
1
gain land and fail with it, than deny to the majority the right to the full
benefits of ownership.
Contradictory approaches to Indian questions were echoed in the
In the foreword to the
attitude of then Commissioner Charles Burke.
Lindquist book, which Mary Austin mentioned, Burke writes, "The Indians'
spirituality is nourished by traditions as ancient as his racial infancy.,
Many of these are as beautiful and as worthy of historic preservation as
the finest fancies of classic mythology. " 10 Yet Burke said a few years
later that, "the old men [assembled in a Pueblo council, were]
.
.
.
half
animals through their pagan religion."11
The muckracking continued as the journals proceeded to define progressive reforms.
Clearly, the fundamental critical achievement of. the move-
ment was this "business of exposure." 12
More and more we can see Indian policy taking shape under the
pressure applied by the intellectuals through these journals, yet the greatest
influence-of the intelligentsia of the twenties would not be felt until the era
of the New Deal.
Policy changes came slowly in the twenties, and what
changes did occur, did not often coincide with the critic's ideals of Indian
cultural and political sovereignty.
In 1925 the Department of the Interior reported its warning that if
we do not educate the Indian properly, he would continue his tribal customs. 13 By 1931, the Department extolled the use of native art and craft;
it said that teach: :s should encourage children to bring their tribal culture
to the elaslroom, and that the old uniform course should be discontinued.
c'
Some substantial changes had occurred in Indian school policy statements.
Yet , the changes were basically cosmetic.
Educational policy was turned
more by the pressures of depression economics than by intellectual or
49
41
..
.--,,,
educational innovation. l4 Indeed, just as in Leupp's day, the,boarding
schools of 1931 were discouraged in favor of-the day schools, because at
the day school the children will be closer to home and that they will mix
with white children.
The growing force of the reformers of the twenties .did change
policy and bring more attention to the Indian political, social, and educational problems.
As these changes were,recommended into policy, however,
their success was measured mainly by the extent to which theys.helped to 1courage economic independence and eventual assimilation:
Art and crafts were
to encourage cottage industry, not,cultural memory. The day school was
not as much an attempt to accentuate community solidarity as a way to keep
down costs and expose the- red child to the habits of the white teacher and
her family.
:
.
..-
There can be no doubt about the assimilationisf policies of the
Bureau during the twenties and early thirties. By 1932 it reported that:
We are not out to captIare any more Indians, and our aim is to
qualify those Indians under our care, and their children, to take
their place in the competitive system which surrounds them. That
means the ultimate breaking up of the' reservation system and its
artificial islands in our civilizatj.on.15
The educational architects of the Bureau continued to mourn the resistance of
'
the traditiortal Indian to the blandishments of white culLural teaching. "Because
of a racial tendency toward dominance of the tribe by the. old people, it [was)
difficult to make education stick."16
Despite the fact that Indian policy was slow to 'change in the 1920s,
,the evidence shows that a shift began to occur near the end of the decade.
The clamor set `up by the new reform began gradually to find its political
expression. There was the report of the "Committee of One Hundred" which
outlined many shortcomings of the Bureau. This Committee was a group of
50
,
42
concerned citizens who convened especially to review the Indian problem.
&ter, in response to mounting press and public pressure, and operating
under the threat of a Senate investigation, Interior Secretary Hubert
,..
Work turned to another group of independent experts for a report on
o-
Indian conditions. The Merriam Committee tils ,-.formed through the Brookings
.
.
,
Institution and led by educator Lewis' Merriam to study the Indian Service
and reservation conditions.
.
The Committee" was outraged at reports of child labor and sub-
standard health conditions in the schools. 17 Commissioner Cato Sells had
excused this, claiming that the great amount of daily routine 'work in the
schools w.s "necessitated by insufficient moneys allocated to run the school.
Other writers have in fact stated that this "child labor" was "considered
educational experience
.
.
.
[and]
. .
,?.
. was necessary; for Congress appro-
priated very small funds for school upkeep, and school superintendants
were forced to make schools as nearly self-sufficient as possible." 18
67
Yet, Congress, at the height of the progressive era, was in no mood
to be tolerant.
..
In 1927, at the Congressional Subcommittee Hearings on
Indian Affairs, committee members were angered at reports `Of children attend-
ing school two or three hundred miles from home. In the later hearings of
1931-1932, Navaho Dane Coolidge testified to the practices of "kid-catching,"
or kidnapping, for the purpose of maintaining attendance records. 19 In 1927
the Senate Survey of Indian Conditions heard testimony that corporal punish,
ment was used at the newly renamed Leupp boarding school. An informant
testitified as follows:
J have seen Indian boys chained to their beds at night for
punishment. I have seen them thrown in cellars under the building. I have seen shoes taken away from them and they then were
forced to walk through the snow to the farm to milk. I have seen
them whipped with a hemp rope, also a water hose.20
51
.
/
The Merriam report was especially concerned with these repor/s
that came out of the schools; for although the Committee reported on, a variety
of social conditions on the reservations, the educational 'service was its avowed
top priority:
The fundamental requirement is that the task of the Indian
service be recognized as primarily educatiodal . . . so that they
[the Indian] may be absorbed into the prevailing civilization or
be fitted to live in the presence of that civilization at least in
accordance with a minimum standard of dececy.21
It is important to note that until
tis
by the Merriam Com-
mittee, no' one had issued an official policy recommendation which proposed
an alternative to assimilation. The possibility that the Indian could be fitted
1
to live side by side with the white was new to the Indian Bureau.22 At the
...,
.
same time, the Merriam report- must be understood as a policy. recommendation
and not as policy.
.
The education section of the Committee' report was the responsibility
of W. Carson Ryan, an educator who, brought the latest ideas of Progressive
education to the Committee.
One of his first plans was to dismember the
Uniform Course of Study first implemented by Commissioner Morgan and re-
instituted in 1916.23 Ryan recognized the need to individuate not only
Indian educational curriculum from the white schools, but within this, to dis-
tinguish curricula from tribe to tribe. He was sensitive to the intertribal
differenced kp language, culture, and environment . 24
The Merriam Report was important for altering the tone of Indian
'
education from a military, standardized curriculth.l, to a more flexible model
with room for change and variation.
In addition, it effected a boost in
educational appropriations, from three million in 1929 to twelve million in 1932.
The discovery of conditions in the reservation and boarding school caused a
renewed interest in the reservation day school. 25
44
The Merriam Committee report was the signal achievement of the
Ithoads, Scattergood Commissionership. They served to separate the era
of boarding school r weatsbops and religious persecution of the years prior
to and including Burke, from the new radical aspirations of John Collier's
"Indian New Deal." However, the implementation of Merriam recommenda-
tions remained a problem. Though the report advised the development of
tribal community ideals, and that the drastic differences between the tribes
be respected, yet its recommendations did not vault quickly into policy. The
heritage of assimilationist thought removed much of the force from the
Merriam report's novel suggestions for co-existence. 26
The Bureau was criticized for unresponsiveness and ill-defined guidelines with respect to the administration of its offices and the, implementation
of Merriam Committee recommendations.
One of the main stumbling blocks
to the acceptance of the Merriam Committee's suggestions stemmed from accu-
sations that the Indian Bureau was.not responsive to the field reports coming
into the office in 1931.
Senator Thomas of Oklahoma accused the Bureau of
not reading the ,reports at all. Further accusations occurred when Thomas
discovered that the Bureau had not even spent the money appropriated by
Cbngress:27
Although the Merriam report offers a change in tack with regard to
the social welfare question, there is'scant evidence that its recommendations
or the policies which followed differed in an important way form the argument
that the In5.lian sho'uld be trained to take his place in the larger white cul-
ture.
28
.
There is. some evidence, however, that the Merriam, Committee was
willing to accept the notion of Indians living alongs'de white ccmmunities;
and; this does present a substantial change from formal assimilationiit policy
statements of the past. However, this is but a small part. of the recommen
.
dation of the Merriam Committee. Still, the social reform efforts Which hid
53
.
45
helped to ;Form the Merriam Committee continued; and there was a c
in the tone if not the substance of policy. The leadership of the ,.;areau
shifted from strict to progressive assimilationists--from Burke to Rhoads.
This in turn led to the tenure of the more radical John Collier, a man who
had a gieat part to play' in the theory and practice of reforin in the jwenties, and who now would shift the direction of th
ureau under his inter-
tretation of the Merriam Committee's guidelines an his singular vision of
Indian cultural and politicaJovereignty.
.54
46
Notes
"The Pueblo Indians With Their Backs to the Wall," TheOutlook
Magazine, December 1922, p. 591.
-2 John Collier, "No Trespassing," Sunset Magazine, March 1923, p. 14.
'3Ibid., p. 15.
4
Randolph C. Downes, "A Crusade for Indian Reform 1922 1934,"
Mississippi Valley Historical Review 32 (1) 4July 1_,95):337.
5
Flora Warren Seymour, "Our Indian Problem- -The Delusion of the
Sentimentalists," The Forum, 71 ('3) (March 1924):273.
glary Austin, "Our Indian Problem -- The Tally of the Officials ,3
The Forum (March 1924), p. 283.
7M.
Clyde Kelly, "The Indian and His Master," Sunset Magazine
(December 1922), p. 17.
8
p: 14.
Walter V. Woehlke, "Let 'Em Die?", Sunset Magazine (July 1923),
9
John Collier, "America's Treatment of Her Indiiins," Current History
Magazine (August 1923), p. 773.
Charles Burke, foreword in G. E. E. Lindquist, The Red Man
and the U.S., pp. 65-76.
1
'John Collier, The Indians of the Americas (N.Y.: The New American
Library, 1947), p. 151.
12
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Alfred Knopf,
1955), p. 185.
13
Report of the Secretary of the Department of the Interior (Washing-
ton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, .1925) , p. 19.
14Report, of the Secretary of the Department of the Interior (Washing-
ton, D C :
15I
16
U. S .
Government Printing Office, 1931) , pp. 84-85.
bid.
Report of the Secretary of the Department of the Interior (Washing-
ton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1.9 ), p. 19'
47
17
Lawrence Kelly, The Navaho Indians and Feddral Indian Policy,
1900-1935, p. 179.
19GorddirileGiCegor, "Indian Education in Relation to the Social
and Economic Background of the Reservation," in Oliver LaFarge, ed.,
The .Changing Indian, p. 118.
19Davida Woerner, "Education Among the Navaho," p. 107.
, p.
a
21
Frances Paul Prucha, Documents of U.S. Indian Policy (Lincoln,
University of Nebraska Press, 1975), p. 219.
Nebraska:
22
D'Arcy McNickle, Native American Tribalism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 92.
23Margaret
2,
London
Szasz, p. 32.
lIbid.
25
Harold E. Fey and D'Arcy McNickle, Indians and Other Americans
Harper Brothers, 1959), pp. 88-89.
(New York:
.26 T he Problem of Indian Administration, Lewis Merriam Director,
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1928), p. 548.
27
U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Indian Affairs, Hearings
before-the committed-of-the-United-States-Senate- on Indian Affairs on H.R.
15498, 71st Cong. , 3rd sess., 1931, p. 8.
28Proceedings of the National Research Conference on American Indian
Education, Herbert A. Aurbach, ed., p. 36.
56
48
CHAPTER VII
APOTHEOSIS OF THE
W TOLERANCE: JOHN COLLIER'S
,-,
"INDIA
NEW DEAL"
The Merriam report stated that ducation was the most fundamental
concern of the Bureau. Through educatio
the Indian could begin to under-
stand better the demands of White culture an technology. This concern had
also been imp.,icit throughout the history of Indi
efforts began, with Merriam, to apply pressure for
educational policy. Reform
different policy direc.:
tion.° It became more important to stress that the Ind n retain his cultural
wisdom; or at least that a benevolent policy of non-inter rence be instituted.
If the Indian school was not directed to teach Indian cultur
it was also
directed not to interfere with tribal life ways. Through the inuence of the
ant hropologiSts and the new cultural science, anti-tribal, pro-Whi
indoctri-
nation in the schools began to fall into disfavor with the Bureau. I dian
culture became a value heretofore unrecognized by the administration.
one had more to do with the beginning of this subtle shift in attitude tha
John cor'r.
While it is not the central concern here to follow the career of any
\\
one reformer or administrator in the Indian Service, it is important to sketch
at least an outline of the growth of John Collier. More than any other figure, Collier passed from a reformer's position in several key issues of Indian
welfare and land policy, to become the main architect of a new age in Indian
affairs--the Indian New Deal. It is important to examine Collier's background
and the development of his thought in order to achieve a better understanding
r.:-i )'
ci
\\
49
of the shape of New Deal Indian Education Policy. For it was for ulated
through the effort of a man who had perhaps contributed more ene ry to
the reform of the Wenties than any other.
As a young social worker in New York, Collier was one of the
reN
form-minded intelligentsia who reflected a concern with the maintenance of
indigenous culture, even as it is pressed by the dominant society to adapt.
His belief in cultural hegemony and community ideals was applied to American
...
Indian peoples, both during his years as a muckraker and leader of the
Indian Defense Association, and later as he led the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
As a writer and thinker, Collier's ideals helped alter policy from outside the
Bureau. Later, however, his belief in Indian cultural and political soy-
ereignty was institutionalized under very different recommendations than that
of the ideal of maintaining Indian indigenous community.
In fact, it-appears
that these progressive policies were accepted through the Bureau by this
set of arguments:
(a) that through a program of Indian health and morale,
we might spare the nation the disgrace of complete categorical genocide; (b)
by educating the Indian in his cultural and linguistic traditions ..-rly in his
schooling, we will be better able to accomplish the task which until now nas
failed--teaching the English language and American values; and (c) by reestablishing Indian morale and by putting his vocational and academic edu-
cation on the right track, we may possibly be able to make the Indian a
self- suporting American; to take him off the financial back and emotional
conscience of the American people.
i
--
These wishes derive from the effect of continued Christian influence.
They also extend from both the new cultural science and from the economic
depression in the wake of a prosperous era.
58
50
John Collier's work reflects both the spirit of the flush progressive
twenties and the managerial economic planning of the New Deal recovery programs.
As a social worker on the lower East Side of New York, he attempted
to do community organization among diverse immigrant groups, and was also
interested in training social workers for community organization and in the
regulation of the growing cinema industry. 1 In New York much of his work as
a staff member of the Peoples Institute was an effort to encourage imigrant
groups to retain their cultural identity, their clothing, cuisine, customs, and
especially, language.
In 1919 Collier went West to do community organization in California.
This attempt withered due to charges of Bolshevism in the climate of the Red
Scare.2
During his tenure in both New York and California, Collier was im-
plored by associates to turn his attention to the condition of the Indian.
He
believed at this time, however, that Indian culture was irretrievable and
that their glory years were behind them . 3 Most of the attempt to channel
his efforts came from his friend Mabel Dodge (later Luhan), a wealthy New
York socialite whose salon had become a meeting place for many of the radical
progressives of the twenties. Lincoln Steffans, Walter Lippman, John Reed,
Emma Goldman, andWilliam Haywood were all part of this group.
Collier
became acquainted with Dodge during his New York years and it was through
her- -that -the influence of these radical progressives began having its effect.
Curio..sly, these thinkers, who would set so much of the tone of the
left wing radical progressive movement had little faith in reform politics. They
thought rather, that America, like Russia, was on the verge of a "cooperative
commonwealth." 4 Further, many of them believed as much in the power of
the pen and the palette as in the muscle of the proletariat.
55
Strongly affected
r.-
51
by the Midwestern literary renaissance and by the development of art in
Europe, this group believed that art, especially the undiluted expression
of the common folk, had the revolutionary power of armies and the cultural
adhesive with which to mobilize the spirit of a \people'.
Dodge's interest in
the American Indian reflected the, interest in his culture and art at least as
much as his social welfare.
It was this emphasis, one with, roots in aesthetic
as well as revolutionary fervor, which branded the sensibility of John Collier.
After the failure of his California venture, Collier took his family to
the Sonora Mountains of Mexico.
He wanted to spend a year camping in the
wilderness, so that he might forget the bitterness of his failure.
He wished
to foreswear his life in the public service. At this time he received a letter
from Mabel Dodge urging him to detour his journey through New Mexico.
She invited him to visit Taos and to meet the. Pueblo people. Collier agreed,
and his detour lasted eleven years. 5
It Taos, Collier became entranced with this vision of a people living
in perfect community and in harmony with nature. Net, their way of life
was endangered from all sides; it was this threat which Collier sought to
blunt.
He came to believe that the Pueblo's communal life-way nurtured human
personality and potential in a manner now lost to Western culture. 6ollier
believed the ege of industry a d machine technology had depersonalized mankind.
He wrote that "
.
.
. the deep cause of Our world agony is that we
have lost that passion and reverence for human personality and for the web of
life and the earth which the American Indians have tended as a central, sacred
fire since before the Stone Age. "s He goes on to say:
The final factor is that for more than a century the bcst minds
of the Occident have accepted as fundamental the isolation of the
individual . . . yet .. . . harried into the wastes, secreted there
for lifetimes, and starving, still the Indian grouphoods, languages,
religions, culture systems, symbolisms, mental and emotional attitudes
toward the self and the world, continued to live on.7
GO
52
Collier began again his concerned struggle for community solidarity and
ideals, yet he found a formidable opponent in Albert Fall, Interior Secre-
tary under Warren Harding; the battle began.
A dispute had developed between the Navaho tribe and the government.
-------
Oil was discovered on their land, so Fall collaborated with the Indian
Bureau to develop the "Indian Omnibus Bill." This bill would dissolve tribal
lands by individualizing tribal assets; pay individuals their portion of the
total, then would quit claim all government responsibility to the tribe. This
would allow the government to scrap hundreds of existing treaties and would
pay in a pittance for the great Navaho oil reserves. This bill was shelved
only through the last-minute efforts of Robert LaFollette, and it stayed there
until Fall was run out of office by another infamous oil issue--the Teapot
Dome scandal.8
During this time another bill was proposed by Fall which was of immediate interest to the Pueblos. Collier was invited to a meeting at which
the Fall-sponsored Bursum bill would be discussed.
The bill would not only
attempt to legally transfer title to tribal lands over to white squatters but,
in addition, it attempted to bring the internal affairs of the Pueblo "city states"
under the jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court. In effect, since Pueblo
internal affairs were guided almost solely by religious traditions, this authority
would mean the establishment of a legal basis for control of Indian religious
practices.9
The tribal council of 1922, to which Collier and a few other whites such
as Stella Atwood, and Mary Austin were invited, was convened to discuss the
bill. This All-Pueblo Council was the first such since 1680.
Pueblo solidarity,
and the influence of Collier, Austin and others, who denounced the bill in the
journals, helped defeat Bursum and with it died the Fall Indian Omnibus
Bill. 10
6J.
53
e yidian Defense Association, with Collier as executive secretary,
was born out of the conflict over the Bursum Bill.
Robert El
Progressive economist
writer Hamlin Garland, and future New Leal Interior Secretary
Harold Ickes were 'all mmbers of the association. 11 During the twenties
Collier and the Defense Association kept steady pressure on the Bureau for
social and political change.
The General Federation of Women's Clubs joined
with them to help apply force to recommendations. 12
The Indian Defense Association formulated the major goals which be%
came keystones of later social policy. Just as the Christian reform of the
1880s and 1890s culminated in the Dawes Allotment Act, the new Reform would
be associated with the Bursum issue, a beginning struggle for the repeal of
--land allotment.
As- the earlier reform sought to Americanize the Indian
thrOugh land, social, and educational changes, there now occurred the beginning of an attempt to revitalize traditional tribal community ideals.
The Indian
Defense Association articulated an argument to rejuvenate Indian culture,
traditional manufacture, and tribal ownership of land. These goals are much
the reflection of progressive thought as John Collier would reformulate it for
the Indian Bureau.
During the years that Collier worked with the Indian Defense Asso-
ciation, there was little evidence of any great change in Bureau policy toward
Indian tribal solidarity. The Bureau reported in 1925 that the future well-
being of the Indian lay in his ability to adapt; that he would absorb our
civilization with school or without it. 13 Even as late as 1932, one year before
Collier's appointment to Commissioner, the Secretary of the Interior reported
that our aim is to terminate the relationship of the Indian with the federal
government. 14 The Interior Department leadership must have acutely felt the
fierce economic pressure both from the expense of Indian welfare and
r (1)
01
ti
54
education and from its knowledge of the unexploited resources of Indian
lands.
The call for Indian independence was a move to economically liberate
the government from the Indian problem. This same need was expressed dif-
ferently in the spirit of the New Deal,
and it filtered throughout the vision
of the reformer who would be Commissioner- -John Collier.
Prisident Roosevelt was discussing the commissionership when he
said:
You have a man from Arkansas [Merrit] I have heard a lot of
protests about him from women's organizations, Indian rights associations, and reformers generally . . . and Harold Ickes, here.
does not want Merrit. He doesn't believe he can work with him.
He wants Collier.
The fact that Harold Ickes got Collier testifies to his influence.
Ickes,
Roosevelt's Interior Secretary, wielded great power in the New Deal administration. He had established his reputation as a trust buster in Chicago af-
ter the war. He had gone after and gotten Insull and Big Bill Thompson.
This "dour battler against evil," also exhibited a "softer side where beneath
his tough facade lay a man deeply.concerned with friendless groups such
as Indians. "16 He was an early member of the Indian Defense Association.
Collier, Ickes choice for commissioner, had been influential in Indian
affairs for ten years.' His momentum and the wake it left behind, resulted
in high feelings about him. He was either distrusted or loved.
His appoint-
ment was unilaterally praised by neither white nor Indian. Nevertheless,
the strong support of Ickes make possible Collier's lasting impression on Bureau
policy.
/
l
Beginning in 1033,.,Collier began the attempt to realize his dreams of re,
surgent Indian community. With the help of Ickes, Collier began to dismantle
the remaining boarding schools.
Indians would now attend the public school. 17
63
rr
JJ
Collier began the groundwork for a progressive social policy.
His effort
represented a good example of the positive social planning which is characteristic of the New Deal.
He attempted to weld his unified philosophy
of Indian cultural values to a firm base of classic New Deal social reconstruction. However, the uniformity of his dream goes directly against the
grain of many groups of highly e;.verse peoples. The Indian, always a people
of great social and cultural diversity had become even more fragmented,
due to the effects of poverty, social disintegration, and assimilation.,
In 1933 Collier helped institute school rrograirs which he hoped might
foster Iridian racial heritage and identity. .A rt and crafts were encouraged
and 'the day school was praised as the vehicle which would provide a center
for Indian community grcwth.18 Indian religion became, as far as the school
was concerned, a sacrosanct institution.
C
There would be no interference
with tribal religious practice. Only a few years before the Bureau had
termed Indian rites pagan and pornograhic.
In 1934, at the beginning of Collier's Indian New Deal, Interior
,
Secrqtary Ickes reported that through fifty years of the "individualization" of
the Indian, he was robbed of economic initiative by the breakdown of his
spirit. 19 - Thus, an effort to boost morale would benefit Indian economic rehabilitation.
The argument, that we raise morale to restore Indian economic
independence, is the crux of the only persuasive method to put Congress
on a path toward radical change in Indian policy. It said that we reduce our
economic responsibility to the Indian. To do this the Indian must be revived
socially and spiritually, and only then can we begin to hope for a change in
their economic status.
Collier's vision of a resurgent Indian community could
occur only against the backdtx)p of New Deal economic engineering.
64
t
56
This renewed interest in Indian culture as a way to revive Indian
spirit and economic resolve is perhaps peculiar to the policies born of the
new reform. Yet, like the firsteriod, changes in educational and social
.
policy are inseparable from the land question.
The defeat of the Bursum bill was a victory for Collier and his
t
cohorts. He was greatly concerned with the problem of Indian land use
and inhereftance.
Indians lost millions of acres when land was transferred
after the owner's death, and white squatters continued to be a problem even
after the defeat of Bursum.
Collier valued traditional Indian values of
democracy and equitable land use. 2U He interpreted the meaning of Indian
..
democracy broadly and this breadth often became troublesome, since differ-
ent Indian groups had very different histories of governance and rules for
property. Yet Collier., in his design, and through his experience with
Pueblo life, believed that a renewal of Indian sovereignty, of tribal hegemony,
would be the beginning of recovery for all Indian societies. This is not to
:t.
say that Collier was insensitive to tribal differences.
He believed, however,
that the basic goal of any community is growth through democratic selfgovernance.
In a climate of recovery politics, this appeal to demOcracy, to
constitutional rights, and for a program Of economic rebirth, proved highly
persuasive to a government ready for sound social experiment.
The developing program of Indian agrarian self-help, coupled with
careful planning, exemplifies recovery programming.
Collier's administration
reflected the economic experimentation of the New Deal recovery, although its
spirit was forged of reformer's fervor, Christian ideals, -traditional American
values, and prosperity. 21 These social experiments were anathema to conservative opponents, yet there were mine who could argue that it was imprudent
to have the Indian off the back of the government and the taxpayer.
57
The twofold push for spiritual and economic rehabilitation continued.
The problems of heirship land, and the failures of allotment, were addressed
by the Wheeler-Howard Act. The Act was an attempt (a) to repeal the land
allotment provisions of the Dawes Act, (b) to encourage tribal corporate land
olinership, (c) to abandon the boarding school, and (d) to encourage cultural
identity through- a program of community education. These recommendations
resulted from the power of the Merriam Committee report and the persuasion
of the journalistic reform. Collier, however, was at first suspicious of the
Act.
It had followed many of his recommendations, yet did not directly argue
for restoration of Indian community, only non interference in their cultural
affairs. 22
However, it had been Collier who led the Senate subcommittee on a
strenuous tour of the reservations as an argument for Bureau reform and
to gain support for Merriam recommendations.
Collier guided subcommittee
activist Burton Wheeler on an attack, first to oust Commissioner Burke,
and then Burke's replacement, Rhoads, because Rhoad: and associate Scatter:
good had been slow in effecting the acceptance of Merriam recommendations.
Collier helped draft the Wheeler-Howard legislation and in 1934 it 'passed,
year after Collier became Commissioner. 23
The Act was a culmination of Collier's dream of revitalized Indian
autonomy.
The Indian tribes would incorporate and would operate as
democratic units. The_land grab brought about by heirship_lands problems
would cease.
Allotment lands would pass from the hands of individuals to
the tribal corporations.. Cultural values would be encouraged through renewed tribal pride and prosperity and communities would develop around
the community day school.
Collier's early experience was with the Pueblos of Ncw Mexico.
Thcy
v...re a relatively stable people with a history of democratic governance and
66
58
Who had been highly receptive to the attack on Bursum bill. VI Collier was
sure that all Indians would welcome Wheeler-Howard, now the Indian Reorganization Act. Yet, by 1934, many reservation Indians were mixed blood,
assimilated Indians. They did not welcome the Wheeler-Howard Act (IRA).
Many were happy with their allotments End resented being segregated into
tribal units. Many were from tribal groups whose tradition of government
was very different froin Collier's monolithic vision of perfect community.25
Still, Collier pressed on with his programs and increasingly turlied
his attention to the development of cultural community. The land battles
never really ceased during the fir$ years of Collier's term and the Indian
Reorganization Act.26
During that period, Collier found time to keep alive the push for Indian
cultural rebirth. Yet his recommendations were often characterized as extentions of the economic recovery program. For example, in 1935 the Indian
Arts and Crafts Board was founded, and it was supported as a way to develop
a cottage industry and create price and label protection for the Indian artist.
A renaissance in aesthetic sensibility had occurred near the time of the
First World War. Artists such as Robert Henri, Lewis Aiken, and others
had discoVered the beauty of the New Mexico Highlands and the strength
and simplicity of Indian art.27 This interest was reflected duting the New
Deal as a value whichgould also be exploited to increase the economic'
independence of the Indian.
There were other such examples of such social
engineering programs, and the Interior Department reported applause for
the effectiveness of such "practical" programs as the Indian Arts and Crafts
Board.28
Just as indigenous art became a means of boosting Indian selfsufficiency, so did Indian culture, and especially language, become a new
67
I
E
59
target for the social scientist. Bilingual, bicultdral programs, were proposed
as a way to sffect a recovery in Indian self-awareness and to increase edu:st,
cational success. Tribal deterioratiqn was & fact that could not be ignored
by Collier's administration . 29 However, the attempt cannot be separated
from the wish to eventually make the Indian' "bilingual, literate, yet proud
of their racial heritage, to become completely self supporting." 30
Educational policy, like land reform, was developed as a "progressive"
way to rid the government of the financial burden of the Indian. Many of
these progressive programs which were described as part of an,enlightened
attitude toward Indian culture were, in fact, institutionalized as part of a
sophisticated program of social engineering. They were accepted into policy
because they were shown to be cost effective and sound methods for rebuilding the morale of a dependent and dying people, not because Americans were
looking for an actual resurgence of tribal cultural sovereignty.
The dreamS of the new reformers and John Collier were themselves
altered to fit the social planning of the Great Recovery, and also tworked
to provide an alternative to assimilation that would be compatible to the
reformers and at least to some of the Indians. The Bureau's education .
division was charged to carry out the Reorganization Act's provisions for
cultural education.
Willard Walcott Beatty was chosen to head this division.
t
Beatty
\ was a "progressive" educator who would institute a bilingual policy for
4. India:, education in order to attack the problem of Indian illiteracy and
resistav:e to acquisition of both English language and American values.31
Collier's vision of indigenous culture was expressed through a notion
of a unified Indian tribal whole, with underpinnings of language, art, and
folk traditions. 32 Beatty organized and argued for bilingual, bicultural
63
-\
...
60
education program was an attempt to bridge the gulf. An examination of
AP
Beatty's cross-cultural experiment continues the story of the dissonant
paradox of the Indian in the white man's training program.
I
I
I
c
I
I
I
I
r
I
I
a
69
1
4'
61
Notes
'Lawrence Kelly, The Navaho Indians and Federal Indian Policy, 1900University of Arizona Press, 1968), pp. 39-60.
IS
1935 (Tuscon:
2Ibid.
3Emily Hahn, Mabel: A Biography of Mabel Dodge Luhan (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1 977), p. 160.
4R.
Lawrence Moore, "Directions of Thought in Progressive America,"
in Lewis L. Gould ed. , The Progressive Era (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse
University Press, 1 974).
.
5
_
EmilyHahn, Mabel: A Biography of Mabel Dodge Luhan
Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p. 160.
6John Collier, Indians of the Americas:
The New American Library, 1947), p.
(Boston:
The Long Hope (New York:
9.
7lbid. , p. 15.
.i
8Ibid., p. 145.
el
9lbid., p. 147.
10
Ibid., p. 149.
"Kenneth R. Philp, "John Collier and the American Indian 1920-1945
(Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University Press, 1 968), p. 28.
1
2Ibid., p. 82.
13
Report of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1925), p. 19.
14
Report of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1932), p. 19.
15Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1959), pp. 556-57.
"Ibid., pp. 282-83.
70
62
17M.
K. Sniffer, ed., Indian Truth 11 (May 1933):1.
18
Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of
the Department of Interior (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1933), p. 74.
19Ibid., 1934, p. 83.
20Oliver
LaFarge, ed., The Changing Indian (Norman:
of Oklahoma Press, 1942), p. 7.
University
21Richard
Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1955), p. 315.
22Lawrence
C. Kelly, "John Collier and the Indian New Deal: Ari
Assessment," in JftnetSmith and Robert M. Kvasnicka, cds., Indian White
Relati(nts--A Persistent Paradox (Washington, D.C.: Howard University
Press, 1976), p. 231.
o
23Randolph
C. Downes, "A Crusade for Indian Reform 1922-1924,"
in Mississippi Valley Historical Review 32 (1) (June 1945):352.
24
Lawrence C. Kelly, "John Collier and the Indian New Deal," p. 234.
25Kenneth
R. Philp, "John Collier and the Controversy Over the
Wheeler-Howard Bill," in Janet Smith and Robert M. Kvasnicka , eds.,
Indian White Relations--A Persistent Paradox (Washington, D.C.: Howard
University Press, 1976) , pp. 171-194.
26
(Lincoln:
Francis P. Prucha, ed., Documents of U.S. Indian Policy
University of Nebraska Press, 1975), p. 229.
27
Paul A. F. Walter, "The Santa Fe Taos Act Movement," in Art
and Archeology 3 (6) (December 1916) (Washington: The Archeological
Institute of America): p. 330.
28Report to the Secretary of the Department of Interior by the Com-
mittee of Indian Affairs (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1935), p. 135.
29T
homcs Weaver, ed., Indians of Arizona: A Contemporary Perspective (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1974), p. 47.
30Oliver LaFarge, The Changing Indian, p. 168.
71
It
63
31lteport
of the Commissoner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of
the De rtment of Interior (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1+35), p. 129.
32J
oh
Collier, Indians of the Americas, p. 66.
72
64
CHAPTER VIII
NEW REFORM DESIGN IN EDUCATION: WILLARD WALCOTT
BEATTY AND BILINGUAL AND BICULTURAL EDUCATION
John Collier chose Willard Walcott Beatty to orchestrate the admin-
istration of the educational service through both the government day and
boarding schools. He was charged to help put the schools in compliance
with Merriam Report recommendations, and to develop a program sensitive to
the cultural needs of Indian pupils. Beatty professed to introduce the
Indian to the white culture without destroying tribal traditions in the process,
despite inherent contradiction of this endeavor.
Beatty expressed the desire to teach the Indian the English language
during the first few years of Collier's term, to give him "the power to speak,
read and think in English." "The children of the nomadic hunter or herdsman" must be taught to appreciate the value of a "fixed abode. "2 The
responsibility of this reeducation must certainly fall with the education division and the school. 3
Collier's belief in the value of Indian cultural community was expressed
through his desire to create an educational program that helped strengthen
tribal political and cultural solidarity.
Indian bilingual education was part
of this plan, and grew equally from recommendations found in the Merriam
Report, from educational provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act, and
from the efforts of educationists such as Beatty, who were concerned to
implement the novel approaches of social science and "progressive" education.
73
65
Beatty appeared sensitive to the deep gulf which existed between
Indian and European-American language and world-view.
He did not, how-
ever, argue that Indian language and culture should be stressed
in school
rA.
for its own sake, that is, to strengthen community and tribal traditions.
Had he done so his program could be identified to extend directly from
Collier's original vision of a resurgent Indian community. Again the policy
clouds the prophecy. Bilingual education is proffered only partly as a
method of "increasing pride in race and culture, which is necessary for
worthy achievement [for] what is equally important [is] an increased desire
to learn nglish!" 4 Beatty goes on to say that the child's use of his native
language in school is more likely to lead, if used in connection with English,
to a greater mastery of English.5 Thus, English language acquisition, is the
foremost criterion offered as an argument for teaching native languages.
Beatty believed that it was possible and desirable to use native languages to
help them take their place in White society.
Later, he attacked the problem of Indian consciousness, perception,
and world -view , both as expressed in language and in behavior.
Those
who worked among the various tribes had known 'or many years that the
structure of the Indian understanding of his world was very different from
that of the European American.
While trying not to over-simplify this issue,
a fair example of this might be the "Indian" conception of time. In "Education for Cultural Change," Beatty addressed' the "problem" of the Indian
time perception.
Beatty referred to "the Great God Time" to which all of
the White world bows.
He encouraged the Indian to do the same, to join
in our worship and to "become accustomed to our clockwork civilization." 6
For Beatty, a greater understanding of Indian cultural consciousness led
not to improved ways to foster traditional tribal world-perception, and
74
66
behavior; rather, to better methods of educating for the elimination
of these traits.
The purpose of the new bilingual program became simply the attempt
to deal with the problem of trenchant indigenous tongues which, though officially unrecognized, were as tenacious as Polish, Czech or Welsh, and likewise
refused to disappear naturally. Beatty's programs, though they made an
attempt to introduce native language primers and to teach native. tongues side
by side with English, were basically an attempt to improve linguistic performance in English.
His work to acculturate ,the- Indian to white time-conception
exemplified the direction of his flandamentally assimilative policy. Some thought
that the attempt to place the Indian in an equal footing with the white man
was not simple patronizing; rather, it was a sound program of social reconstrucildii-; However, these programs were conceived in an effort to enable the
Indian to live in both an Indian and a white world, not to strictly limit,his
choices.
Yet, more often than not, this left the Indian dangling between two
worlds; for so much of the Indian world view is enextricable from the para-
meters of his culture and tradition, and especially language.
Anthropologist Edward Sapir was one of the first to make this identification of world-view with language.
For Sapir, language is not simply a
group of signals, but a complex conceptual framework which is the means of
expressing a native speaker's cognitive understanding of his world.
7
For
example, Navaho language represents an "importantly different mode of think-
ing," which lies at the heart of what it means to be Navaho.8 The Indian
child is acculturated in many ways; his bodily expression, beliefs, relations
with family and others, and fundamentally through his mode of expression-language.9
Some have argued that we should not equate the loss of these Indian
languages with the loss of the consciousness and the thought they express.
"/5"
67
For, "just as Cornish, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish nationalism can be ext,
pressed in the English language, so too can Indian tribal consciousness
\
survive the loss of Indian languages." 10 Those who would make this clairil
ft--_
+o see the great gap between Indo-European language bases, such as
those mentioned, and Indian languages, which are the expression of a
world-view conditioned by a radically different conceptualization of the fundai-nental processes of nature.
The notaan of identifying language inseparably with world-view is
perhaps most closely associated with the name of Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Through his study of Hopi language, Whorf further elaborated the theory
that,in a very important sense, language creates our thought, rather than
that thought is merely expressed through language. This linguistic rela1
tivism gains special significance when applied to native American languages
which are so markedly different in form, content, and use from Indo-European
tongues." The seeds of Whorl's ideas can be found in the work of Boas,
Humboldt and others who pioneered developments in modern anthropology
and linguistics. Though Whorl's ideas gained great notoriety, they also
aroused much controversy.
In fact, the notion that language shapes thought
touched off a linguistic debate which continues until the present.
Those
opposed to Whorf have claimed that since the fundamentals of human experi-
ence are more similar than diverse, the shapes of linguistic thought are not
disparate enough to be important . 12 Yet Whorf and his students believed
that the linguistic differences were the most important factor by which to
illuminate whatever differences do exist , and can tt efore tell us more
than any factor about the operations of perception and cognition.
Linguis-
tics and the study of meaning are the truest gauge of a cultural psychology. 13
7b
68
Whorf thought that through the study of language one can begin
to Understand the difference between Hopi and European conceptions of
time.
14
The Hopi "thought world" is analyzed in terms of "eventing" and
time is expressed without strict regard to past, present, and future.'
It
implies that "existents" do not "become later and later all in the same way;
but some do so by growing, like plants; some by diffusing and vanishing;
some by a procession of metamorphosis; some by enduring in one shape
until effected by violent forces."15
Sapir restated this notion that language fundamentally outlines consciousness by showing how environmental interest influences the vocabulary
of a language.16 The numerous words for snow in arctic tribal languages
are simple evidence for this.
These absolutely fundamental differences in Indian and White
language created a dilemma for attempts to teach the Indian English.
English
literacy appeared to be the way to help the Indian compete in White society.
At the same time, many Indians did not want to abandon their traditional
languages, and many Bureau policymakers hoped to encourage tribal language
for the salutary effect it had on English language competency. They believed
that "instruction in Indian languages [allowed] the Indian child to avoid the
choice formerly forced upon him of choosing between a non-literate, backward
Indian would and a literate, progressive, but alien white world." 17 In other
words, the Indian was being encouraged to be neither white nor Indian, but
somehow a mixture of both.
However, if it is true that "language [is] the
medium through which culture becomes perhaps, most truly articulate," then
how can the Indian transfer his unique world view, his traditional inheritance,
from the medium of an Indian language to that of an Indo-European?
77
69
John Collier and other reformers believed that the inscrutable
Indian mind was "an inward state, a feeling apart
.
.. sacred,
.
.
.tea
feeling having nothing to do with the outer accouterments of feathers or
blankets
.
.
.
19
under Collier, Beatty was able to introduce an
educational program which served to accelerate English language acquisition and adoption of American values and European world-view. There was
little room to develop values which the tribes had traditionally passed to
their children. The skills and activities taught the Indian child had once
borne a direct relationship to the tribal life way. 20 Yet Beatty envisioned
the great alteration in this life way; the Indian needed to pass muster in
the American social and economic army. No educational plan was responsible
without provision for this inevitable change. Yet, Beatty did not question
to what extent or with what speed the Indian himself chose to make passage
into the white world. His programs were devised within the exigencies of
New Deal Recovery planning. Indeed, while Beatty tried to ease the Indian's
passage into white society, he did not consider that "while education and
assimilation might be related, they are in principle and in actuality two far
different social processes."21 Beatty could not envision a multicultural,
multilingual society; a culture within a culture, operating to effect a recovery
in its own terms and in balance between its traditions and the dominant society. Yugoslavia is perhaps a good example of a government with nationally
recognized linguistic minorities. It is difficult to imagine, however, American
sentiment encouraging a similar policy; an alternative to the traditionally
accepted American values and virtues, expressed through nationally accepted
minority languages.
Unlike other national minorities, the Indian people did not possess
the power or the minority cohesion to effect a true self-determination. They
70
were unable to completely coordinate theii interests and efforts due to a'
complex of political problems: successful attempts to sow the seeds of
political division, from within and without, local cultural variations, poverty,
and other factors, reduced the ability of the Indian people to cohere for
action in their own self-interest.
Indeed, their interests had often greatly diverged, and this fact
was used continually throughout history to divide and conquer. Social
scientist Murray Wax comments on this issue of Indian political power in relation to education policy:
The "problem" of Indian education requires a decision as to
how we wish to live in this country and what our inhabitants are
going to require of each other in order` to have a harmonious kind
of coexistence. This more than an issue of values, it is also a
matter of power--and one of the reasons why the schools have come
to the Indians, in the way they have, is a matter of relative powerlessness. Had the Indians been stronger, the schools would have
had to come to them in terms of their native language (as, in a
very few cases they did). Had the Indians beenstronger, the
schools would have had to come to the Indians in such a fashion as
to permit local control (by the Indian tribe) of those schools; but
the Indians were not that strong.22
Truly, the program of bilingual education, conceived through Beatty's office
was another species of the usual educational policy for the Indian--a further
attempt to assimilate. 23 Indian policy in reality became, once again, more
closely allied with the traditionally accepted attitude toward Indian destiny.
The effects of policy came a far cry from the direction which was initiated
by the vanguard of
bicultural education
w reformers.
The designs of the New Deal bilingual,
grams differed only in detail from earlier attempts
to socialize and assimilate the Indian people.
ro
7,1
71
0
Notes
'Willard W.alcbtt Beatty, in Indian Truth, M. R. Sniffin, ed. , vol.
15, no. 5, May 1938, p. 4. Published by the Indian Rights Association
(honoring fifty-four years active non-partisan work for Indian civilization
and citizenship).
2Ibid.
3Ibid.
41ViIlard Walcott Beatty, "Education for Action," selected articles
from Indian Education 1935-1943, published by Education Division, U.S.
Indian Services, 1944, p. 147.
5Ibid., p. 148.
.......C.
6
Willard Walcott Beatty,"Education for Cultural Change ," selected
articles from Indian Education 1944-45, U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau
of Indian. Affairs, 1953 (Chilocco, Oklahoma: Printing Dept. Chiloccd Indian
,Agricultural School, 1953), p. 131.
7
Thomas Weaver, ed., Indians of Arizona: A Contemporary Perspective (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1974), p. 15.
8
Clyde Kluckholn and Dorothea Leighton, The Navaho (Garden City,
New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1946), p. 267.
9
Thomas Weaver, p. 153.
'
10Wilcomb
E. Washburn, The Indian in America (New York: Harper
and Row, 1975), p. 261. '
.11Harry
Hoijer, "The Sapir -Whorf Hypothesis," in Harry Hoijer, ed.,
Lanoline in Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 93.
i
12
Franklin Fearing, "Conceptions if Benjamin Whorf in the Fight of the
Theories of Perception and Cognition," in Harry Hoijer LirtRulge.inqulture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 57.
13
,
.
Beniannn Lee Whorf, "Thinking in Primitive Communities,'.' in John
B. Carroll, ,ed., The Selected Writings of Benjamin L. Whorf (published
jointly by The Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and John Wiley &, Sons, Inc., New York, 1956), p. 73.
.;
SO
.
72
1
4Benjamin Lee Whorf, "An American Indian Model of the Universe,"
in John B. Carroll, ed. , The Selected Writings of Benjamin L. Whorf (published jointly by The Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1956), p.57.
1
5Benjamin Lee Whz-,-,f, "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior
to Language," in Leslie Spier, A. Irving Ilallowell, and Stanley Newman, eds.,
Language Culture, and Personality -- Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir (Nlinosha, Wisconsin: Edward,Saph Memorial Publishing Fund, 1941), p. 84.
16Edward
Sapir, "Language and Environment," in David Mandelbaum,
ed., Selected Writings of Edward Sapir (Berkeley, California: University
of California Preffs, 1958), p. 91.
17
Wilcomb Washburn, "Indian in America," p. 262.
18
aeorge Herzog', "Culture Change in Language Shifts in Pima Vocabulary," Language, Culture, and Personality --Essays in Memory of Ed:vard Sapir
(Menosha, Wisconsin:* Edward Sapir,Memorial Publishing Fund, 1941), p. 74.
19Davida
Woerner, Education Among the Navaho, p. 171.
20
John W. Friesen, People, Culture and Learning (Calgary, Alberta:
Datselig Enterprises, Ltd.P1977); p. 115.
I
21
111'urray Wax, in Herbert A. Aurbach, ed., Proceedings of the National
Research Conference on American Indian Education, panel discussion: Relations
to and Commentaries on Background Presentations II and III (Kalamazoo, Mich.:
The Society for the Study of Social Prciblems, 1967.), p. 68.
22Ibid., p. 69.
23
Guillermo Bartelt, "Two Approaches f3 Acculturation, Bilingual Edu- v
cation and E.S.L. ," in Journal of American Indian Education, May 1979, p. 18.
8
fai
73
EPILOGUE
Much of the Character, if not the substance.-of New Deal Indian
.4'
educational and soci l policy derived from the vision of a determined group
of reformers and ihtellectuals. As a leader and chief theoretician of this
group, GotnatIszoioner John Collier brought the visions of these people cloz,-;.-:e
to reality. He belio",, ed tile communal institutions of the Southwestern Indian
to be an alternative to "the troubleu, frustrated, but struggling Aryan
individUalized consciousness,"1 For a brief time the Indian relationship to
White society was recognized frog, a different vantage point. The new reformers were not simply concerned with health And social welfare of the
Indian.
For the first time the loss of indigenous Indian culture was per-
ceived not simply as the desiccation of a quaint set of aboriginal traits,
but as a species of genocide. The Indian cultures became examples of
"genuine" social health, of an integrated vision of life.2 Under the influence
of the new social sciences, Indian life ways became an idealized alternative
to fragmented, de-personalized "Aryan" culture.
However pure the reformer's dream may have been, it was not
seriously tolerated as an alternative Indian des4y. The programs which
were accepted by the administrati e establishment, even during Collier's
term, were supported only to the extent which he could project their value
for producing economic independence and eventual assimilation of the Indian.
Although the Indian Reorganization Act helped slow considerably the transfe
of Indian land to white control, the idea of a society within a society, of a
people rebuilding an Alternative existence within the context of disparate
74
American value and belief systems, was never seriously considered. It was
to remain the broken hope of the new reformers and, in particular, of John
Collier.
The most obvious policy extension of the new reform was the beginning
of bilingual, bicultural education. Yet these plans were formulated to encourage a more effective English literacy program; to create an efficient early
context for the transmission of civilized "values" to a "profligate" people. 3
Bidulturalism in education fared much the same.
Cultural diversity is some-
times alluded to as the by-product of a democratic society. Indeed, John
Collier believed he saw fundamental democratic spirit during his experiences
with the All-Pueblo Council.
He attempted to encourage this quality and
many of his political moves, some of which resulted in the Indian Reorgani-
zation Act, were attempts to insure Indian self-determination.
Yet
any
of the New Deal policies were tolerant of racial and cultural diversity only
as long as they were consistent to national aims of economic recovery, 'and
traditional goals of the eventual submission of the Indian into the goals
within the American social and economic fabric. True self-determination 'had
no place in the engineering of the "Indian New Deal."
In any case, the second World War brought an end to Collier's experimentation.
Whatever small advances were introduced at this time were
reversed after the war. With the beginning of the Relocation Programs
-of the 1950s, Indians were subsidized for removing from the reservation to
. the cities,, as the government redoubled their efforts to erode the reser-
vations, and to melt the Indian into the greater populace . 5 By 1968 the
_Kennedy Report stated that many of the recommendations of the Merriam
Report of 1929 were "yet to be accomplished. "6
83
75
The bilingual programs were largely abandoned and bicultural curricu-
lum materials, which had made an attempt to include reference to the realities
of reservation and tribal life, were left to collect dust in storage. The
attempt to introduce Indian culture to the curriculum were "mere cross-
currents" which served to "obscure the true direction of the mainstream"
.
edu;:otion for assimilation.. 7
It was useless, perhaps, to believe that the greater goalF
i: America:,
culture, which resound so clear from the Wyoniing territorial newspaper cited
at the beginning of this paper, could have been significantly altered by any
American reform movenrenteven though so much of the shape of government
Indian policy was f &ged in the heat of forty years reform fervor. Yet
Reform movements differed from each other in few important ways.
They
were poisoned from the start. White evangelists or white intelligentsia,
each oiled the machine of assimilation im a trivially different way.
Ruth Benedict, a pioneer ethnographer and student of Franz Boas
once asked an elderly Californian Indian how his people believed the world
was created and how they accounted for the people of the world.
His reply
is a powerfrl reminder of the white man in the world of the red:"
"In the beginning, God gave to every people a cup, a cup of clay,
and from this cup they drank their life. They all dipped in the water,"
he continued, "but their cups were different. Our cup is broken now.
It has passed away." 8
To it, another may be added: that in the affairs of the Indian, "the white
man cannot pretend to be the doctor. He is the sickness. "9
84
76
Notes
'Kenneth R. Philp, "John Collier and the American Indian," p. 88.
2
Edward Sapir, "Culture, Genuine and Spurious," in David Mandelbaum,
ed., Selected Writings of Edward Sapir (Berkeley, California: University of
California Press, 1958), p. 318.
3
John W. Friesen, People, Culture and Learning, p. 40.
4Lynrte Hulsizer, "Region and Culture in the Curriculum of the Navaho
and the Dakota" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1940), p. 16.
'Margaret Szasz,
Education and the American Indian, p. 3:
G'fheodore Fischbacher, "A Study of the Role of the Federal. Government in the Education of the American Indian (Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona
State University, 11)67), p. 384.
7Ibid., p. 475.
8
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston:
1934), pp. 21-22..
Houghton Mifflin Co.,
9Vine Deloria, "Panel Discussion" in Herbert Aurbach, ed., Proceedinos of the National Research Conference on American Indian Education, p. 13.
.
85
77
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